This is an article that's so ahead of its time that it's likely to be ignored. The TL;DR is that true agentic development doesn't improve the software dev lifecycle, it throws huge chunks of it in the trash.

When your context environment and constraints are properly designed, many planning, testing, and review stages can simply be skipped. It's remarkable but true.

> Requirements gathering: fluid, not dictated

> Requirements used to be handed down. A PM writes a PRD, engineers estimate it, and the spec gets frozen before a line of code is written. That made sense when building was expensive. When every feature took weeks, you had to decide upfront what to build.

In the 20 years I've worked in software. I've never even seen a shop that works this way. From 20 person teams to 10,000 employee companies. Maybe I've been lucky. but to me it reads as a straw man. Something to punch against that doesn't really exist.

> Design used to be something you did before writing code. You’d whiteboard the architecture, debate trade-offs, draw boxes and arrows, then go implement it.

Again, I've never seen this. Usually it'd be a senior engineer who spun up a project, implemented a proof of concept, and then mid and junior staff would be onboard and work within the project's design patterns, occasionally refactoring the design if it outgrew its original footprint.

I don't necessarily disagree with the agent workflow, but we should compare it to what actually proceeded it, not some imagined dummy process that never really existed. It weakens, not strengthens, the piece.

Note: I'm sure you experienced these, but have you considered that you're an edge case? I've equally considered that perhaps I've just been extraordinary fortunate in my career.

Most, if not the entire article reads to me as AI-generated which just makes me uninterested in reading further.