Comment by xxwink

Your aerospace analogy is fair, and I'd push back on one thing: the problem isn't that developers don't plan — it's that most planning tools for software are too lightweight to actually constrain AI output. "Plan mode" is indeed vibe-coding with extra steps if your plan is a bullet list. I've been building a Go web framework using AI as the primary code writer. What made it work wasn't a task list — it was locking architectural decisions upfront in a document the AI reads before touching any file. Not guidelines. Decisions. Closed. With rationale, rejected alternatives, and consequences documented. Any change that crosses a decision boundary gets stopped. Any change touching more than one file requires an explicit Amendment — numbered, approved, then implemented. If you've worked with formal change control in project management, it's exactly that mental model applied to AI-assisted development. The AI writes code. It does not decide what gets built or how the pieces fit together. That's closer to your requirements derivation + down-select model than to anything most software teams do. The difference is the tooling forces it — the AI won't proceed without the context, and the context is the spec.