Driving Is Easy

"Dad, is driving difficult?" asks my 7-year-old.

I replied: Driving is easy. It's the other people on the road who make it hard.

Steering a car on an empty, open road is easy. You get the hang of it fairly quickly. What makes it hard is that you have to take into account what everyone else on the road is doing.

Software engineers know this too well: Implementing fixed requirements against a static universe is easy enough. But the universe isn't static. People, both from the inside and the outside, have their own ideas of where they want to go, and so you need to be constantly shifting and adjusting. You need to be "agile" in a literal sense.

I'm experiencing this right now on a client project: Some behaviour change in the application needs to be implemented. Well, implementing "it" would be the easiest thing, and I'll get right to it as soon as everyone agrees on what "it" is.

Incidentally, the better you, your company, your team etc get at figuring out what "it" is, the greater the chance that you'll see benefits from AI coding. Because (surprise!) the coding agent definitely needs to know what "it" is before it can implement "it".

That requires good conversations, and because those can't be outsourced to AI, they're where the rigorous thinking must go.