Imagine doing AI development in waterfall. You spend weeks writing your prompt, when you think you have it perfect, only then do you submit it to the AI. Then you wait a week or so, and see what it produced, expecting it to be exactly what you wrote.

Or, do you tell it the basic functionality you want, test it out, then add feature after feature that you want, sometimes dropping them and sometimes adding new ones that you thought of as your worked.

The vast majority of "AI is changing everything!" takes I read say more about people's fundamental misunderstandings of the software development lifecycle (the real one that companies actually do, not the one that people think they do or what companies say they do) than about anything AI is going to change about software eng.

If anything, their solving the complete wrong problems and being blind to the actual problems is probably a reason AI won't actually result in any real, top-level appreciable gains in shipping speed.

Waterfall came out when hardware and software had to be developed together, and appealed to traditional Engineering practitioners. You are right though, when the hardware constraints went away, software (more code) was cheaper and easier to ship in increments and iterate. But feature-rich products were still difficult to ship - and you had to pick and choose what things to spend your time on.

The SaaS-pocalypse is occurring versus investors don’t believe that to be true anymore.

I think they will still be wrong because ultimately people want people (particularly experts) to be held accountable for things - shipping high stakes software, running company ERPs/CRMs, and more.

Honestly posts like theirs are just indicative of someone who never understood their job/role.

People throw out terms like agile or waterfall, shit on agile etc. probably because they work at some worse than mediocre place let alone ever done their own thing.

It’s annoying lol