This advice is so contrary to good outcomes that I am astonished. Even aside from the amazing utility of funding super smart people to follow their curiosity about the world, maths, species, string theory, neural networks, etc., just keeping it to coding, you don’t want engineering to just implement specs, you want curious people to dig under what is being said; the space of potential solutions in software is so great that you can’t waterfall your way into the best solution; it is a search, and one where the quest for elegance and abstraction and beauty enable not a ten X coder but a solution that catapults the company 100 or 1000 fold over the competitors with less elegant solutions. It’s the whole ideal behind Paul Graham’s beating the odds. It’s the story of companies that grew 70% a month while their competitors tried to make plans. Maybe you all are too young but companies that innovate and constantly delight the community are possible and systems that implement the software can be amazingly more elegant and expandable than expected. on the outsourcing, the places I have seen outsourcing succeed it is because the company can find and pay more minds either that precious gift of abstraction and simplicity and created or renovated systems so well that the outcomes based teams were just scratching their heads in wonder, if they had enough wit.

I have seen inelegant minds generate big balls of crap with AI and I have seen people wield them like scalpers thru the space of possible solutions.

I don’t disagree with using LLMs, but some puritan call for industrial efficiency as the answer is really missing the story on the last forty years of software innovation.

If the parent and grand parent represent common attitudes, no wonder so many companies are constrained by ugly software.

I really sympathize - but the truth also is that the vast majority of coding is commodity software production. "Process data from a website form" sort of stuff. I take your point that some coding is only possible when great minds go on open ended searches for novel approaches, but there's a limited subset of projects where that's a necessity.