TLDR Tech / Design
Design Docs Considered Harmful
Design docs are often outdated artifacts that describe systems that don't exist, serving primarily to provide organizational comfort and approval rather than actually guiding implementation. The fundamental problem is that detailed prespecification forces teams to make many decisions with little information, which contradicts the core principles of iterative development learned from failures. Design docs delay actual coding and learning, creating a false sense of predictability in an inherently uncertain software development process.
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