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Comment by midnitewarrior | Hacker News Reader

I see rapid, iterative Waterfall.

The downfall of Waterfall is that there are too many unproven assumptions in too long of a design cycle. You don't get to find out where you were wrong until testing.

If you break a waterfall project into multiple, smaller, iterative Waterfall processes (a sprint-like iteration), and limit the scope of each, you start to realize some of the benefits of Agile while providing a rich context for directing LLM use during development.

Comparing this to agile is missing the point a bit. The goal isn't to replace agile, it's to find a way that brings context and structure to vibe coding to keep the LLM focused.

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"rapid, iterative Waterfall" is a contradiction. Waterfall means only one iteration. If you change the spec after implementation has started, then it's not waterfall. You can't change the requirements, you can't iterate.

Then again, Waterfall was never a real methodology; it was a straw man description of early software development. A hyperbole created only to highlight why we should iterate.

> Then again, Waterfall was never a real methodology; it was a straw man description of early software development. A hyperbole created only to highlight why we should iterate.

If only this were accurate. Royce's chart (at the beginning of the paper, what became Waterfall, but not what he recommended by the end of the paper) has been adopted by the DOD. They're slowly moving away from it, but it's used on many real-world projects and fails about as spectacularly as you'd expect. If projects deliver on-time, it's because they blow up their budget and have people work long days and weekends for months or years at a time. If it delivers on budget, it's because they deliver late or cut out features. Either way, the pretty plan put into the presentations is not met.

People really do (and did) think that the chart Royce started with was a good idea, they're not competent, but somehow they got into positions in management to force this stupidity.

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