| ▲ | mpyne an hour ago | |
Man I love and agree with nearly everything about this post except that I wouldn't take the advice to follow waterfall or PMBOK literally. The post laments that it's hard to find Dr. Royce's original waterfall paper. That's probably true, I have my copy from a compilation book “Ideas that Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science” edited by Lewis [1]. I do agree that it's important to do things like scope out your demands of your AI agent, check-in on progress, give as clear a requirement and test cases as you can. But you've always been able to do that with agile methods, and LLMs are fast enough that you don't need to go full waterfall (and if anything it would be counter productive). Dr. Royce's paper talks about literally thousands of pages of documentation being needed for any reasonably useful system. Good luck fitting that into even a 1M context window :P. But the main point to thesis, that you can't just let your coders loose to do whatever and expect the right results even pre-dates Fred Brooks. I'd argue it goes all the way back to the beginning, to the comments about Baggage's computing machine where British politicians asked if it would generate the correct answers even with incorrect inputs. The answer then is the same answer today: of course not, and expecting anything different is foolishness. | ||