I’m not sure how to say this without sounding smug, but the last year has shown that most of those things just… don’t matter. It’s just the next level of the “variable naming PR comment battle”, so will become obsolete very soon.

Obviously there are mission critical systems where it matters, but if “your code can be A/B tested” or “slowly rolled out”, chances are, it doesn’t matter.

You'll find that design matters when token spend starts facing real accounting.

Tech debt is still tech debt, even if there exist models that can wade through, because it's going to require increasingly sophisticated models navigating increasingly large context windows and increasingly speculative workspace operations to keep making progress on it.

Vendors like Anthropic and OpenAI are laying a pit trap when they demonstrate how their models can independently code their whole platform as it becomes increasingly byzantine and inscrutable because not only do they benefit from internal/prerelease models but they have effectively unlimited spend because all that spending acts as a lure to draw you into their trap.

For everybody else, design still matters. People are just working really hard to make you forget.