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> I don't think I've ever seen thinking things through at design time deliver any real benefits (...)

That's mostly the Dunning-Kruger rearing its head. It makes zero sense to state that making fundamental mistakes has zero impact on a project.

This type of obliviousness is even less comprehensible given that every single engineering field has project planning and decision theory imbued in its matrix, and every single intro to systems design book has its emphasis on failure avoidance and mitigation, but somehow in software development hacking is tolerated and dealing with perfectly avoidable screwups resulting from said hacking is ignored as if they were acts of nature.




I suspect it's tolerated because it works better; IMO the value of planning is something cargo-culted from engineering fields where changing something after it's partially built is costly. In software, usually the cheapest way to figure out whether something will work is to try it, which is in stark contrast to a field like physical construction.




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