[throwway120385]

Suppose that an LLM would produce excellent, production-ready code automatically given high-quality architecture and design documentation and proper requirements. Could we offload the code generation to the machine and focus on producing architecture and design documentation? And would that provide meaningful improvements?

I don't know the answer to that. But it's an interesting point that's buried in the article is that companies like to shortchange that part of the process, and it's that part of the process that is the most important to getting good code out of an LLM. I suppose part of the problem with using LLMs is that the providers have a vested interest in collecting fees that are barely less than the fully-loaded cost of the development staff.

So it'll be interesting to see if some companies find themselves ratcheting up on the documentation, and then revisiting the need for the LLM when the LLM pricing rises to the maximum the market can support.

[daxfohl]

I find the back and forth more productive. Lots of up front requirements and docs is like waterfall. You do everything up front and don't realize until implementation time that the design is unclear, has flaws and contradictions, etc.

Often it feels more efficient to take shorter steps, try something in code, we how it looks, update docs, show a demo, etc. That was true before LLMs and I think LLMs make it even more true.

[indymike]

Nah, we’d still get architecture wrong.