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What skills are you prepared to lose? Which can you afford?

Offloading work to another entity means you do not train the required skills, eventually you get worse. Writing code seems like one of those skills where it’s ok to offload it. We are engineers, not artists. We are here to solve a problem, sometimes with code.

Yet I wonder if that’s a good idea. When I write code I learn. Things that I thought where clear from the description become ambiguous when written as code or when interacting with existing features. Slowly my mental model of the application builds up and I can express part of the app with drawings.

I learn to reason about the application. I learn about the domain because I model it as clear as I can. I learn how to slice problems so I can implement them in baby steps. And of course I get fast feedback.

There are of course drawings I can use to reason about the software (UML has ~13 of them) but aren’t they more a artifact which developers with a mental model use to collaborate on the design? We were here before when we wanted to design software only through UML diagrams.

In short: if programming is theory building, can we do something else to get the same benefit without programming?

Like talking to real users? Talking to previous devs of the project? Appreciating the insights of our dedicated test team? ...