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.

This quote from the article really sums it up:

And to be clear, I don’t care whether you typed the code yourself. I care whether you understood it before you shipped it. I care whether you can explain why the bug happened, why this fix is the right fix, what the model might have missed, and what would make you roll it back.

Could you elaborate on this?

Thank you! I've updated the post with the TL;DR from the article.

An acronym for domain-driven design.

This behaviour sounds a lot like addiction. It has been argued that AI coding tools may be triggering the same dopamine loops as slot machines.

Depending on your level of programming experience, you might find the exercises at Exercism quite useful.

In case anyone is curious, this is the original post on X.

Some developers are now spending $500 a day (!!) on Claude Code. Practically speaking, this means that employee costs have doubled.

Where is this magic money tree for tokens? Reading through this article, it seems that some companies are happy to spend money on tokens. However, I doubt there is the same enthusiasm for training or conferences.

I am against scrolljacking too. Though having read through the article, and seen the animation in action at https://whimsy.joshwcomeau.com/, this is not scrolljacking, it's just something that animates as you scroll. It's so unobtrusive that I didn't notice it the first time.

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.

Do we know the average user hits the back button when they encounter CSS animations? I was just a conference, and people were talking about browsing the web in reader mode, which I'd argue is more likely.