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Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 (kimsj@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 03-Apr-2026 22:57:35 JST Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷
in reply to
@adrianww @simon_brooke @bob @aral
At the start of any project it is impossible to know what you don’t know. That’s why Waterfall always fails.

In conversation about 3 months ago from mastodon.social permalink
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  Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 03-Apr-2026 22:57:35 JST Aral Balkan
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  @KimSJ @adrianww @simon_brooke @bob Couldn’t agree more :)
  https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114160190826192080
  In conversation about 3 months ago permalink
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    Aral Balkan (@aral@mastodon.ar.al)
    
    from Aral Balkan
    
    Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanding what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem. When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine. #AI #VibeCoding #design #development #making #creation #artiface #craft #coding #programming #technology #humanity
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  Adrian W (adrianww@mastodon.scot)'s status on Friday, 03-Apr-2026 22:57:36 JST Adrian W
  in reply to
  @simon_brooke @bob @aral I’d go so far as to say that, really, none of the established patterns work well. They are all bound by their own assumptions as to how software development “should” be done but none of them really consider how the whole system will work in the real world.
  I’m very glad that I’ve been out of that game for a while now, although I do try to keep in touch with what’s happening and spend a fair bit of time rolling my eyes.
  
  In conversation about 3 months ago permalink
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  Simon Brooke (simon_brooke@mastodon.scot)'s status on Friday, 03-Apr-2026 22:57:37 JST Simon Brooke
  - Aral Balkan
  - Bob Mottram :debian:
  @bob @aral I have never in my professional life -- forty years in software development -- seen a 'waterfall model' project succeed. Not by my team, not by anyone else's team.
  Fully specifying software before you start to build does not work; the more innovative your software, the more it doesn't work. You need to write, and evaluate, and think, and try again.
  There are lots of established patterns for doing this; many work well.
  Waterfall, in my experience, never works.
  
  In conversation about 3 months ago permalink

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