alt Hacker News> I think in the age of AI coding, these rationales are a bit outdated. And if you think they're not - I'm curious to know why you think so.
Can you share more about how you think AI invalidates these rationales?
Replies
luc_ • today at 4:33 PM
I think we definitely need to have alignment, and documentation to support it. I think this can be at the PRD level, mostly.
For many systems, I'd argue technical documentation to understand how the internals are working can simply be handed off to the robots. Or generated on the fly. And if a requirement on the product level is not met, that can be changed under the hood.
As the other commenter said, "code is cheap" now.
The biggest thing AI enables is cheap code.
That means you could choose to try three (or more) genuine implementations and explore their tradeoffs, instead of making three proposals in a document with one recommended (and the other two usually only provided for contrast).
I do think the design is important to keep around - in particular, the constraints, the communication points, schema, tacit things that might not be clear in code. I am not certain that the design should precede the implementation for features below a certain size though.
Larger efforts need milestones and collaboration and will have multiple people doing implementation, so there's more need to agree schemas, APIs etc up front there.