For anyone who hasn't worked in a waterfall project and would like to try: You are kidding yourself.

There is no such thing as a perfect spec. Read that again and say it outloud.

It took humanity 50 years to figure out that perfect specs are impossible, unless of course you know exactly(!) what you need. And even then, the specs are never complete.

The reality is that we often don't know, and can't know, what we want, exactly, until we actually see and experience what we said we wanted. Then we adjust. Try again.

That's the reality for individuals already. By simply using logic we can deduct that entities made of more than one individual, aka companies, will not behave better. They just make it look better by giving you a nice document that says "we want this!", only to then come around when they see what they got, and to claim "wait, we didn't mean it like so!".

That's just human nature. Not much we can do. AI will not change that.

So when some people think AI will deliver perfect software given perfect specs, hence we have to write the specs first! That is just missing the boat my a mile.

Agile is not a process but a human-friendly way of doing things. It simply says hey you want this? Let me build that and show you. Then let's adjust or move to the next thing. Rinse and repeat. Agile works because it matches how humans think and act. Step by step, day by day.

Also their experience is not my experience. I will make my own choices.

That's like letting one group of students have a strict closed-book exam, while another group can take the test as a group exercise and accessing any material they like, then claiming that closed-book exams lead to worse outcomes.

In a nutshell the study is just slop designed to get attention. The headline result is what they really want people to hear, and that's all the media will be repeating.

That is pretty much an accurate discription of what planes and birds do.

To plan means "to reason with intent".

That is very much not what LLMs do, and the paper does not provide evidence to the contrary. Yet it uses the term to give credence to it's rather speculative interpretation of observed correlation as causation.

Interestingly enough there is no definition of the term, which at least would help to understand what the authors actually mean.

I would be more inclined to take a more positive stance to the paper if it used more appropriate terms, such as call observed correlations just that. Granted that would possibly make for much less of a fancy title.