Problems you can't understand without solving them first

In complex situations, you cannot understand the problem without solving it first. The only way to get additional information is to try something and see what happens.

Jorge Manrubia writing about coding and solving complex problems:

Writing and making code work is costly; thinking and discussing things in the abstract is cheap. Everything holds up on paper, but computers are picky. I don’t believe that LLMs – as revolutionary as they are – will change this imbalance soon. Spending time building something that ends in the trash seems wasteful. How much time I could have saved if I had thought of this or that first!

This is a natural but flawed way of looking at things. After all, if building the right software was a matter of putting enough upfront thinking, we could make the whole thing predictable, which is an idea the industry abandoned more than two decades ago.