[RHSeeger]

> I truly believe that everyone that says that typing is a chore once they've got the shape of a solution get frustrated by the amount of bad assumptions they've made.

To a lot of people (clearly not yourself included), the most interesting part of software development is the problem solving part; the puzzle. Once you know _how_ to solve the puzzle, it's not all that interesting actually doing it.

That being said, you may be using the word "shape" in a much more vague sense than I am. When I know the shape of the solution, I know pretty much everything it takes to actually implement it. That also means I've very bad at generating LOEs because I need to dig into the code and try things out, to know what works... before I can be sure I have a viable solution plan.

[skydhash]

I understand your point. But what you should be saying is that you have an idea of the correct solution. But the only correct solution is code or a formal proof that it is in fact correct. It’s all wishes and dreams otherwise. If not, we wouldn’t have all of those buffer overflow, one by off errors, and xss vulnerabilities.

[RHSeeger]

All we _ever_ have is an idea of the correct solution. There's no point at which we can ever say "this is the correct solution", at least not for any moderately sized software problem.

That being said, we can say

- Given the implementation options we've found, this solution/direction is what we think is the best

- We have enough information now that it is unlikely anything we find out is going to change the solution

- We know enough about the solution that it is extremely unlikely that there are any more real "problems/puzzles" to be solved

At that point, we can consider the solution "found" and actually implementing it is no more a part of solving it. Could the implemented solution wind up having to deal with an off-by-one error that we need to fix? Sure... but that's not "puzzle solving". And, for a lot of people, it's just not the interesting part.