With LLM-aided dev (Codex and Claude Code), I find myself going back to patterns that are closer to …

> bridge/skyscraper/cathedral > Those details matter, yes, but they’re the type of detail that I can delegate now No... If you're building a skyscraper, there's no world where you can delegate where the steel or bolts come from. Or you'll at least need to care about what properties that exact steel has and guarantee every bit used on your project matches these constraints. If you don't want to care about those, build residential houses with 1000x less constraints and can be rebuilt on a dime comparatively. You might be thinking about interior decoration or floor arrangement ? Those were always a different matter left to the building owner to deal with.

Can you go into a bit more detail on your perspective of the 70s/80s approach vs. today? I’m an analyst with a passion for engineering, but am not an engineer by trade. So honestly I am naive to how now would be different from the past.

There's not a lot that Brooks got wrong but the surgical team is it. There's not a lot of team in a surgical team. Software does not need to be limited to one thing happening at a time the way open heart surgery does. There's room for more hands. It's more like a sports team. But we don't practice, review, or coach the way they would, and so it takes a lot longer for us to reach excellence.

We're now getting in a position where we have CAD for software, aka CASE, Computer Aided Software Engineering. You can focus on the design of the software, instead of spending hours typing out code.