I watched extreme programming, and then agile morph into "waterfall, but on a one week cycle!" (For extreme programming, two weeks for agile.) "Modern" softwar

I watched extreme programming, and then agile morph into "waterfall, but on a one week cycle!" (For extreme programming, two weeks for agile.) "Modern" software development is based on the idea that waterfall doesn't work, but that you can fix it by only allowing projects that take either one week (dot com boom) or two weeks (web 2.0 boom). Personally, I avoid all this stuff as much as possible, since I've never seen any of it work. I have had good luck with LLMs, for what it's worth. I've found for step 4, writing an informal spec at the top of the source file works well: // $ curl https://api.com/foo/bar?baz // { json: "response", goes: "here" } along with instructions like "implement the interface defined in some other file", and "look at some other existing file for guidance" works well, as does "implement some trivial data structure from scratch". Then I have to read what it wrote and fix the inevitable 2-3 bugs + compilation errors. It usually gets the boilerplate right, but misunderstands fundamental things. This maybe saves me 50% of coding time, since my first draft usually has bugs + doesn't compile on the first attempt either. This really shines in step 5 (not listed above): Writing tests. I generally end up with more thorough tests than I'd write from scratch in maybe 20% of the time. Anyway, LLM's let me get about 10-20% more done per week. Most time is still spent designing stuff and evaluating solutions. The above workflow doesn't work for non-trivial modules. It just saves time on boilerplate. It's plagiarism the same way IDE auto-complete and copy / paste (from the same codebase) are.