It’s like a big waterfall design. It’s rare you have all the requirements of an app known up front. It’s pretty rare that they’re known so well you could heads down code non stop and have some result matching a spec.
Usually the coding is iterative and collaborative with other people. You ship something to a customer/colleague. You discuss “is this right!?” You evolve accordingly. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect coding agent writing 100% of the code - active discovery of what to build IS the job.
Where fully autonomous coding makes sense is when you don’t care and most defaults are fine. In this case you’re working aggressively top down on a problem. Start with the default rails app version of your app, fine tune in small steps what’s custom.
Or your task is heavily verifiable a priori, like a C compiler. Or translating a parser with great tests from language A to B
It’s like a big waterfall design. It’s rare you have all the requirements of an app known up front. It’s pretty rare that they’re known so well you could heads down code non stop and have some result matching a spec.
Usually the coding is iterative and collaborative with other people. You ship something to a customer/colleague. You discuss “is this right!?” You evolve accordingly. It doesn’t matter if you have a perfect coding agent writing 100% of the code - active discovery of what to build IS the job.
Where fully autonomous coding makes sense is when you don’t care and most defaults are fine. In this case you’re working aggressively top down on a problem. Start with the default rails app version of your app, fine tune in small steps what’s custom.
Or your task is heavily verifiable a priori, like a C compiler. Or translating a parser with great tests from language A to B