Build shared context on software engineering problems, reach consensus before the work starts, and have confidence that you’re building the right thing.
The Problem
Describing a solution to a software problem is difficult. A software project is an amorphous, multi-system endeavor, with millions of lines of code that don’t fit into any one person’s head.
Bringing everyone up to speed on a problem takes virtual meetings, documents and diagrams, and direct messages. Proposers of new features juggle these side channels alongside their day-to-day development work, and because the decision-making has no concrete deliverable, it is often unstructured.
The effects of a misaligned technical vision are even more amplified today as software engineers are working at the speed of their AI agents. An incorrect feature now gets implemented and shipped within hours if the right guardrails aren’t set at the design phase.
Every hour spent getting everyone to the same understanding is an hour before implementation can start. The faster people get on the same page, the fewer engineering hours are wasted in planning, and with agentic development this is exactly the part of the work you want to speed up.
Senior engineers are expensive. Having them spend their day re-describing an architecture decision to juniors is a waste of time and money. Your seniors should be spending their time solving business-critical engineering problems instead.
When an engineering decision has to be reversed, the time goes into undoing it: databases need to be reset, redeploys need to happen.
If a service that your company owns goes down because of a misaligned decision upstream, customers may run to a competitor for that service.
Mistakes at this point are painful and costly, and are felt by many different types of engineering organizations:
In medium-sized organizations and larger, one team commonly relies on another for an API boundary, a data model, or anything else. Consensus must be achieved before any engineering action is taken.
Remote hiring means working across timezones and cultures. This means that communication on a technical vision must be exact and traceable before the work starts, so that remote employees feel confident in their implementation.
Teams working where an incorrect decision is difficult or expensive to walk back once made: embedded and air-gapped devices, financial services, and many more.
Teams moving at the rate of their AI agents need a firm understanding of what they're building, and what has to be aligned, before they let their agents run wild on the codebase.