I wonder if there's a parallel here with the journey that some people go on with respect to design documentation in general. In can be easy to have a mandate fr

I wonder if there's a parallel here with the journey that some people go on with respect to design documentation in general. In can be easy to have a mandate from on high that your process should be research -> planning -> design -> review -> implementation -> review -> ship, and that the design doc is the key deliverable between the design and implementation stages. You can even argue that this is an "agile" process, if there's a feedback loop that permits the design to be revised as further discovery emerges during implementation. But the reality is that an awful lot of the software we build just isn't complex enough to warrant all this ceremony. It's not branchy, there's no significant error handling to talk about, no big new dependencies being added, no security implications, no long-term maintenance of an external interface— it's just grabbing widgets from pile A, frobnicating them, and dropping them on pile B. There's barely enough there to even unit test much less write a "design doc" about and agonize over in a meeting with bigwigs. And unfortunately a lot of the projects that junior developers start out with look exactly like this. Boring, obvious code that does one thing in the exact boring, obvious way that you'd expect. So it's easy to fall out of the habit of thinking intentionally about design, until you're suddenly faced with a big thorny problem that legitimately has multiple paths forward, and what starts as a rubber-duck conversation with the person beside you eventually becomes "hmm... I think I need to write down a page or two that describes these options, gives background on why the choice matters, describes why the selection was made that was made; then maybe afterward I'll circulate that document to my colleagues for their review and thumbs-up, because maybe there's something I'm overlooking here that they could contribute to?" Oh wait.