I'm surprised no one has already mentioned this, but this idea has been expressed before in Peter Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" (1985): he argues that a program can’t be reduced to its source text; it’s a theory shared by the programmers. When the original team is gone, maintainers must rebuild that theory (often painfully) from the remaining traces.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Not to say the article doesn't have value, as great foundational ideas are always worth repeating and revisiting.

"product is the knowledge in the code, not the code itself".. and other interesting observations. That might be relevant in current to-AI-or-not-AI questions

Published as book - The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software , 2003, Phillip G. Armour

https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Software-Process-Production-Mana...

Coding agents let me build and throw away prototypes extremely fast. A major value, for me, is that they help me understand early what users truly want and need — rather than relying on assumptions or lingering in abstraction. They help me discover and reduce my ignorance.

The intro is really good and stands alone. I'd point any outsider to this as a decent description of hacking, programming, software engineering, prototyping in general.

>As a development life-cycle model, prototyping acknowledges that our job is not to build a system, but to acquire knowledge.

So if there is any hope in making software development faster, we need to focus more on the specification part - to get it right faster.

This would be so useful of a model, in personal development, life and more! Incredible take on this.

Funny how something written in 2000 can sound so modern.

> the real job is not writing the code, or even building the system — it is acquiring the necessary knowledge to build the system.

Not only very true, but the grammar will trigger those who insist on forcing the "that's written by AI" meme. I love it.

... And here's the first three orders mentioned in a famously quoted press conference from 2002:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REWeBzGuzCc

Ok so he’s got KK, KDK, and DKDK, but he’s missing DKK.

This is one reason why artificial general intelligence is impossible. It is because most of the knowledge needed would require knowledge that does not already exist in text form.

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