> All of this article, both the good (critique of the status quo ante) and the bad (entirely too believing of LLM boosterism) are missing (or not stressing enough) the most important point, which is that the actual programming is not the hard part. Figuring out what exactly needs programmed is the hard part.

HARD AGREE. But…

Taken as just such, one might conclude that we should spend less time writing software and more time in design or planning or requirement gathering or spec generating.

What I’ve learned is that the painful process of discovery usually requires a large contribution of doing.

A wise early mentor in my career told me “it usually takes around three times to get it right”. I’ve always taken that as “get failing” and “be willing to burn the disk packs” [https://wiki.c2.com/?BurnTheDiskpacks]