[lambeosaurus]

I agree with you both.

Technically the source is a blueprint. But this comes down to scale.

Among other things I've worked on banking and corporate management applications. You cannot reason about the codebase at that scale. In these instances it's not possible to have a good outcome without a blueprint.

Using the building metaphor, you can get away with building a bird feeder without a blueprint. You can't get away with building a skyscraper without one. Houses, maybe. Either way, high level blueprints help everyone.

[br3w5]

Good points - I think you need some kind of spec or something to reason about. But I don't think it needs to be complete because it is easier to iterate on software than buildings.

Taking the building metaphor, you can't clone a building locally and make changes to it, then ask another builder to review them, suggest some changes then push them out to a test environment before finally putting them into the real world. So for me, the building metaphor only goes so far but there are definitely some useful points in the article.

[ArekDymalski]

> you can get away with building a bird feeder without a blueprint

Definitely. But anyway, unless you have built several bird feeders or similar constructions before, your first version will probably be ugly and you'll have to iterate on it (i.e. find the right angles etc.) to make it better. What is of course fun, but costs you time.