Design docs are great for some things. In particular they are good places to document interfaces and contracts for those. However, for interfaces it would be better to have architecture documents instead of design docs, with design docs really being internal details.

Of course, few companies make this distinction between architecture and design, so in practice design docs are a mix of architecture and design.

At Sun we didn't use design docs for this. We used architecture docs instead. These were of the form of PSARC cases with materials such as:

- interfaces lists, with attached commitment levels

- interface contracts where interface commitment levels do not otherwise allow teams A, B, and C to use each other's interfaces.

That's much better than design docs.

The difference between architecture and design -at Sun anyway- was this:

  - architecture is only about interfaces
  - design is about details like algorithms

I was thinking in terms of a broad usage of "design" which tends to match what you wrote about architecture.

Often people mean "architecture" when they say "design", yeah.

When you need buy-in from others outside your team, you probably need a design doc. Even when you don't, if the design is not trivial then a design doc will help your successors understand what you were up to.

I find the same.

I'm a bit shocked that this comment got flagged and went dead -- it might or might not be correct in its claims, but flagging it seems ridiculous to me.

In principle you need a banking license in order to create money, so not "anybody" can create money. For example, I can't, and neither can you (unless you're a bank, which I suspect you're not_.

If you work for me and I owe you, that’s money.

You can sell that debt on to somebody else in exchange for goods and services.

That’s all money is - a circulating debt.

Not necessarily, could also be IOU, but usually today its the local money from a state/gov - you could also sign up for working for "1 liter of milk,3 potatoes etc."

His point is that vendor loans are a way to get around the banking license restriction. Of course this only works between two entities, not a general customer base. They get around that problem by pumping their valuation on the stock market where anyone can join.

> heavy lifting

Load bearing, heavy lifting... Your comment wasn't LLM-written, either. I think we're starting to see LLMisms infect human writing. I might try to start speaking like this and see if anyone notices. It could be a good gag.

Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. Heavy lifting was plenty common enough prior to LLMs.

Or you might find out how little people care about AI. Which would not bode well for bearing load.

The whole thing is clearly written by Claude.

Yes I covered that after the comma if you didn’t make it that far.

This sentence quoted just doesn’t seem like the AI smoking gun to choose given the rest of the content.

It was just the first example that stuck out to me. I didn't do an exhaustive check to look for the worst offender.

Sorry I assumed you read the whole thing, forgot where I was for a moment

Yeah, we have a habit of not bothering to read LLM-generated prose.

Yeah that's definitely the source of the didn't RTFA epidemic, surely.

> load-bearing

Apart from LLMs, who speaks this way?

I say "doing a lot of heavy lifting" all the time. I have heard people use load-bearing though it's less common. Other than habit I don't see any real advantage to the version I use over load-bearing.

structural engineers?