I think we came from an “evolved form” from the 70s when everyone wore businesses suits and “planned” things meticulously.

The lower bar of modernity may seem edge, yet dispute tooling and architecture advancements, development itself has lowered to the lowest common denominator.

Evolved programming will either be, the environment “knows” better than you and compensates, or the developer has a more structured understanding and is clever and succinct in implementation strategy.

I fear this as one art devolving to ease of use rather than technical sophistication.

Do you believe waterfall was better and agile is a sort of race to the bottom? I do feel we have low quality requirements in the parts of the industry I've worked so far. It seems common to shove frameworks on Github with code that doesn't fully work, vast gaps in documentation, and combinations of build options that have never been tested. But I haven't been around long enough to know whether it's always been this way. Hardware at least usually seems to have good documentation.

Conventions aren’t the concern. Mental preparation is.

The agile process does not need as much cognitive overhead, features are iterating (and revising) in smaller unstructured increments.

Cognitive overhead foresees problems, pre plans, and usually prefers working to spec. This approach also takes too long to discover over/under-sight.

Slower, sure, yet everyone can relate to products that feel well thought through versus those which are wired together to provide certain features.

With AI assist, those with more competent language and planning skills will produce more consistent results (though the less experienced may explore more).

Which brings us to an actual intrigue: CURATION is king , whether it is features or art or content. Bringing a gratifying experience together (form or function) is the ultimate product.