The Problem With Waterfall

When I show people how I work with agents, I’ll often hear, “Wait, isn’t this just waterfall?” And the answer is: well, kind of. Plan out your work by sitting down and talking to the agent Work with skills that help fill in the gaps before any code gets written Keep going until you and the agent are confident the plan is ready to be built Have your agent build the feature Test the output Iterate, iterate, iterate The reason people think this feels like waterfall is that my planning phase is often as long as, or even longer than, the code-writing process. I may spend 2–3 hours planning, then have an agent spend 20–30 minutes writing the code, followed by another 20–30 minutes of QA and iteration. The problem with waterfall was never that planning is bad. The problem was that you could spend three months designing everything upfront before you even had the chance to find out whether your design was wrong. Agile sought to fix this by shipping and iterating quickly, bringing user feedback…