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Comment by xtracto | Hacker News Reader

We need to start talking about real Software Engineering concepts. The stuff we will write to guide agents to build our software.

We will be building architectural blueprints for software "buildings" same as Civic Engineers and Architects do for bridges and towers.

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I don't think it speaks well of Software Engineers the will to delegate the construction of blueprints to unreliable workers. Architects and Civil Engineers know that licensed, professional people that have experience and know-how will execute it in a nearly flawless way. Compared to that, agents might hallucinate, build something completely different to the intended project or leave subtle bugs behind that, in the case of complex systems, the humans in charge will probably not even notice.

A parallel to what you're describing would be the Hyatt Regency collapse. Meticulously designed, yet one small change under the surface lead to one of the worst engineering disasters of that century.

I don't want to think of what the digital equivalent of the Hyatt Regency collapse would be, considering that the software could be deployed all around the globe rather than in one place in one building.

> We will be building architectural blueprints for software "buildings" same as Civic Engineers and Architects do for bridges and towers.

If only we knew how. All we seem to know formally given popular discourse is languages, frameworks, tools, protocols and algorithms.

Thinking about how to move beyond functional decomposition and structured design to enable those “blueprints” isn’t even on the agenda?

You underestimate the amount of detailed tedious work that is done in those fields. It’s far from being all about architectural blueprints.

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