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Unfortunately I think Cognitive Debt is the cry of the software craftsperson who thought they were an Engineer. Upon working with the agent subcontractor, the a
by hogehoge51 5mo ago
Unfortunately I think Cognitive Debt is the cry of the software craftsperson who thought they were an Engineer. Upon working with the agent subcontractor, the agent factory, the agent part vendor, they approached it as a craft; they found themselves wanting to walk through the offices of the subcontractor reviewing screens, inspect pieces at the factory, and get the internal design for the parts they ordered. It's natural to get overwhelmed: this is why Engineers have contracts, specifications, design drawings, datasheets, and characterization data, handed over at clearly defined boundaries of abstraction, accepting the other side may be a black box.
Of course, we have had compilers and tooling, but those are the pencil and drafting board of the draftsperson. An ecosystem of packages, dependencies and APIs has evolved, but those are often just spells the software magician invokes after reading the spellbook^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H stackoverflow^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H API documentation.
We are going to need to build a new set of boundaries and abstractions with new handover protocols to manage this mess.
- platzhirsch 5mo agoBecause waterfall software engineering has been so successful, right? ;-)
- saulpw 5mo agoBecause agile has been so successful, right? ;)
- platzhirsch 5mo agoAgile fails when folks don't adjust and tailor the process to the specific needs of their team or organization but instead try to cargo cult it.
- vrighter 5mo agoso it's called agile when it works, but not when it doesn't, got it!
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- habinero 5mo agoYou gotta understand how to use a tool for it to be effective, yes.
- scorpioxy 5mo agoAnd if a tool is that difficult to use, how can you tell if the problem is in the tool or the user? There's a large industry built around doing training and certifications in agile methodologies now. If a tool is that difficult to get right, maybe it's just not a good tool to begin with. To be fair, the manifesto and methodology is quite good in theory. But I just have never heard of(or experienced) it working properly and the response is always that it wasn't implemented correctly.
- bonesss 5mo agoSo the widespread existence of business programs, certification and training heavy, obviously proves every project and business methodology is “bad” and the problem is the tool of “business methodologies”? PRINCE2, for example, is constantly fumbled and misunderstood by immature juniors. They don’t get it, and screw it up. So… what? Haphazard planning and last minute project detonations must replace any effort to avoid such outcomes? It’s chicken and egg. You have screwups who can’t manage and think wrong, so you formalize rules so dummies can’t hurt leadership, and then you have to train people. A stunning number fail to ‘get it’, suck at management, and do what they feel with justifications instead of following the book. That’s standard distribution at play. Blaming methods for basic management failures is a management and culture failure. “I’ve never seen [agile] implemented correctly” is saying you didn’t fix communication issues. That’s fine, that’s hard. But that’s a meatspace issue, not process.
- scorpioxy 5mo agoI am not sure how you jumped from what I said to this. I don't believe I claimed that every project and business methodology is bad. I can only speak from my experience and am not confident enough to say how every project and business methodology should or shouldn't work. I do believe you are helping to make my point though. I am saying that the process may very well be perfection but if entities within "meatspace" cannot use it well and may never be able to use it well then how useful really is it.
- marcosdumay 5mo agoIn fact, agile has been extremely successful. It's the people that claim to "do agile" that invariably don't do it. But software development used to fail most of the time, and it doesn't do that anymore.
- scorpioxy 5mo agoWhat makes you say that it has been extremely successful? And when you say doesn't fail anymore, do you mean it doesn't go over budget and/or changes scope?
- Turskarama 5mo agoAgile cannot go over budget or scope because those are failures of planning. Agile is the methodology that was developed specifically to counteract those problems with planning. Projects that use Agile can go over budget and scope but they never do that because they are using Agile, rather they use Agile because they might do that.
- sevenzero 5mo agoIt always felt like Agile is the lazy attempt of people unwilling to learn what it takes to build software, to make it more predictable. Unfortunately project planning methods that work for buildings are not really great for software. It's just corpo stuff project managers do to feel meaningful.
- marcosdumay 5mo agoIt goes severely overbudget less often, it rarely goes unused, and it causes organizational changes more often than not. Except on the places that "do agile", those got worse. There is an organization that tracks that, I don't remember the name.
- s-lambert 5mo agoIt used to fail once after a long time, now software fails a lot every 2 weeks.
- 5mo ago
- onion2k 5mo agoLots of very successful software was built using a waterfall approach. It's a methodology that works well if you know precisely what the end result needs to be. That doesn't make it appropriate for everything - if you don't know what the customer needs, or if you want to get an MVP out, then Agile works better, but you shouldn't dismiss an approach because it doesn't work everywhere. Plus, 'agile' in quite a lot companies is really waterfall that's been broken into sprints without the planning of proper waterfall or the discovery and learning of real Agile. The software still gets built though. Maybe software is actually quite easy to plan.
- mikestaas 5mo agoAgilefall, the worst of both worlds.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoAs if anything in the world is ever pure. Waterfall can have small scrums run on side-shows, while staying waterfally on the center project.
- praptak 5mo agoThere is no party capable to take responsibility on the other side of the handover protocol.
- hogehoge51 5mo agoYes, this is the thing - an agent is not a counter party. But it role plays one really well. You would need the agent to be a processing step owned by someone responsible. But the intelligent part of an agent is what makes it viable as something more than a processing step. What to do with an intelligence that can't take responsibility? Not answering this question leads to cognitive debt.
- raincole 5mo ago> this is why Engineers have contracts, specifications, design drawings, datasheets, and characterization data, handed over at clearly defined boundaries of abstraction AND inspecting the actual production line. Even Apple audits Foxconn (the most successful and reliable assembly line humans ever built) onsite annually.
- eithed 5mo agoI think this is nothing new and comes down to just working with people, even without LLMs - many times I found myself puzzled by "what does this code do that was merged in by this person without my approval?"; without specs and docs it's inevitable, unless you're maniacally inspecting every PR and holding this knowledge in your head.
- zephen 5mo agoSo, the craftsperson looks at actual artifacts, but the engineer reads specs and drawings. > but those are often just spells the software magician invokes after reading the ... documentation. Oh, but the craftsperson does read shit after all. Do you even read what you, yourself write?