CONCEPT
Plan to Throw One Away
Brooks's 1975 prescription — 'plan to throw one away; you will anyway' — recognizing that the first implementation of any system is exploratory, a way of discovering what the system should actually do. AI has made throwing one away trivially cheap.
Chapter 11 of The Mythical Man-Month bears the title 'Plan to Throw One Away.' Brooks's argument was that the first implementation of any non-trivial system is not the final product but a learning experiment. The builder cannot know, before building, what the system should actually do. She learns by building a version that approximately does what she thinks it should do, discovering through the implementation the gap between her initial understanding and the problem's actual shape. The prescription follows: plan for this from the start. Build the first version knowing you will throw it away. Build the second version with the understanding the first produced. AI has made the economics of this prescription dramatically more favorable — the first version can be built in hours, not months — but the learning it enables still depends on the builder's capacity to evaluate what the first version reveals.
