Software Practices from the Scrap Heap?
March 5, 2026
I’m going to keep writing half baked things about AI, because it’s what I’m spending a noticeable number of hours thinking about these days, and because I don’t think it’s possible to be fully baked on the topic. Apologies in advance for those who find it irritating.
Software engineering as a practice has its origins in the late 60s and a famous symposium about the software engineering crisis when the ad hoc techniques and uses of pretty nascent technologies to build really important systems like nuclear weapons systems appeared to be failing.
Over the last coming up on 60 years, methodologies and practices have emerged. Waterfall, which was largely replaced by Agile. Canonical texts like Fred Book’s, The Mythical Man Month, still shapes our thinking about software engineering. But software engineering in no small part was about managing scarce human resources. And when humans developing code is no longer the heart of their software engineering practice, What remains from the lessons of those last 60 years? Does the mythical man month still apply when it’s ages? We see you have resurrected the waterfall style approach of specifying upfront and then letting our systems generate the code from there. As with everything to do with the transformation we’re undergoing, there really aren’t answers right now.
There are questions, there are experiments, and there are the lessons others have learned that they are generous enough to bring back to us full discussion.
