Waterfall 2.0

Waterfall 2.0 - The Quiet Return of the Methodology We MickedOpen any AI-coding repo on GitHub today and count the markdown files. Then count the lines of code. The ratio has been climbing for two years, and in some projects - especially those built around Claude Code, Cursor, or Aider - the specs now rival the implementation in size. PRDs, architectural decision records, agent.md, claude.md, plans.md, tickets.md, a folder called /specs that nobody would have opened in 2019. We told ourselves we'd buried waterfall. We wrote a manifesto about it. And yet here we are, writing a four-thousand-word specification before a single function exists. The Thing We Said We'd Never Do AgainWinston Royce's 1970 paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems is the foundational document of waterfall - and one of the great misreadings in software history. Royce drew the famous diagram (requirements → design → implementation → testing → operations) on page two and then spent the next eight…