London based software development consultant

  • 587 Posts
  • 92 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2025

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  • This is a fascinating article about the history of software development. For me the key quotes are:

    The thing that killed Waterfall was that discovering your spec was wrong months later, after lots of code had been written - and fixing it cost a fortune because writing code was the most expensive part of the process.

    The key reason Agile was invented was to account for the high cost of writing code, so yes, that part of the Agile value proposition is no more.

    The risk isn’t that AI development is inherently Waterfall. The risk is that organizations with latent Waterfall instincts will use spec-generation as license to do the bad thing they always wanted to do — front-load requirements, skip customer validation, equate a fancier document with a better outcome, and ship one massive thing every quarter.















  • That is a good question. The beauty of the web is that readers can control their experience, be it with ad blockers, increasing the font-size, reader mode, or even changing the whole experience with user style sheets or Greasemonkey. This doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time to bother with pretty designs. People should build websites that they’re proud of, and accept that people might override their design with one better suited to their needs or taste.





  • Agreed though the article has this disclaimer:

    Before we dive into the code, I think it’s worth pointing out that the goal is largely to be immersive and expose some lore. I think this design and effect fit because of the theme and because it’s not for critical content. My point is that it’s just an aesthetic component for a game that makes this acceptable — I don’t think this is necessarily a good user experience for your every day website where there are stakes.