The Need for Planning

I had a funny conversation today. We were chatting about AI agents and how people are using them. I brought up the incident that happened at Replit and what a few of us have been seeing, how a lot of people are using these agents. We slowly started discussing how AI agents require context and a plan to really produce a good solution. Then you slowly continue to prompt it to refine the solution. Of course, I couldn’t resist saying that “back in my day,” we performed planning, created some architecture diagrams that we refined as a team, then broke down the work to get started. I then proceeded to say that it made creating the solution much simpler, as it was just a matter of refining some details and executing. I find it super humorous that “old” things are being rediscovered as a necessary part of the process when using AI. What’s even funnier is that it was that long ago. As a profession, we have seemed to abandon the idea of doing a little bit of design, establishing a context, then refining it as we build. There is a rush to start slinging code, not solving the problem.

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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