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Agile to “AI” — The Most Expensive Pivot Ever
And why everyone’s a prompt engineer now.
The Grand Game of Software Engineering is really, especially on the management side, a game of continual pivoting.
Let’s start with an example. Waterfall, that genuine GOAT of the many useful software development methodologies (I love flowcharts, me ) that works optimally, even to this day, as most agile houses are just waterfall divided into sprints anyway. But then, the snake oil bandwagon rolled in, the charlatans said “things needed to be more flexible”, and agile was born amidst a cloud of the usual laminated attendance based certificates, lurid PowerPoints, and the inevitable eye watering invoices.
Then there was outsourcing, the great pivot of the late nineties where some consultant, presumably between rounds of golf with the CFO, noticed that developers in other countries cost less per hour and extrapolated this into a business model with all the rigour of a back-of-a-napkin calculation at a three martini lunch.
Everything could be done cheaper somewhere else, and if the eighteen-month delivery overruns, the 3am conference calls, and the code that looked like it had been written by a committee of people who’d never met each other (because it had) were any indication of a problem, well, that was just your implementation.
