Skillsets needed

James Shore speculates on the difference between an old fashioned designer and one of those new-fangled continuous designers:

The main difference is that a traditional designer invents a good design and a continuous designer reviews an existing design and comes up with ways to make it better.

Interesting side-effect - the new guys have it easier: recognition is easier than invention

There's no such thing as a perfect up-front design. There's too many unknowns for that to be possible, and no amount of time spent imagining the future will change that fact.

It's easier to teach people how to review designs and make refactorings.

Meanwhile Al Sweigart disdains the whole notion of understanding before doing

I’ll argue that to really understand software, one has to go down this rabbit hole all the way to the bottom, as far as assembly or machine language. But one doesn’t need to understand assembly (arguably the lowest of the programming abstraction layers) in order to actually write useful software, even professionally.