> Stakeholders will only give you requirements after they see the prototype.

That’s very much incorrect and sounds like someone who love building more than communicating. Even without a prototype, users and other consumers will be able to explain their problems. It may not use the same metaphor map that you’re used to. But it’s very much a description of the problem space.

Once you design a prototype, what you will get is feedback about the solution you’ve designed, not the raw problem. If you’ve not listened well in the first place you may be well off the mark, and have to work harder to correct things.

Even if your story, the junior would do way less work by asking the master what he intends to do with the piece of work instead of focusing on the rock itself.

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kimjune01 4 hours ago | parent [-]

whether the hypothesis originates at the users or in your guess for the users is irrelevant in that they're both hypotheses with no certain outcome until trial.

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skydhash 4 hours ago | parent [-]

They are. But engineering is about minimizing costs in solving a problem while ensuring requirements are met. Not worrying about costs is not engineering. It's either a research project (where you want to know if something is possible) or playing around.

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imagent 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The cost of prototyping has dropped so much due to LLMs and coding agents that it basically always makes sense to prototype something to elicit feedback, just as part of the requirements gathering process. E.g. if you can spend $50 to understand something that will save you two weeks of effort, wouldn't you do that? That's the sort of dynamic I'm talking about.

	▲	skydhash 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The cost of prototyping has always been very low. I can quickly sketch a UX flow using balsamiq. Or copy-paste paste code from docs and examples to show a rough working model with. If you can extract the essence of the problem you can quickly realize cheap ways to demonstrate a solution, and not spend two weeks trying to code it. If there’s something that is wrong with using LLMs to prototype, it is that those prototypes are always too complex. Instead of decomposing a problem and testing unrelated concerns apart from each other, it’s often a mix of everything that the LLM user had been thinking about. Often there’s no rapid iteration where you are comparing several approaches. Instead it became tunnel vision and confirmation bias where if it’s working, that means it’s the solution.