02 / 10
Can’t I just download a process and follow it?
npx halfcycle You can, and the ones out there are good. Writing the process down was never the hard part. But a document cannot read your work back to you, cannot notice that the plan contradicts itself, and cannot decide whether what you built is ready. It knows what its author knew on the day they wrote it, and it will never know anything more.
A rulebook cannot check its own work.
Some of the processes you can download are genuinely good, written by people who have built a lot of software. Follow one carefully and you will do better than if you follow nothing. That is worth saying first, because it is true.
The trouble is the word follow. A written process is a list of steps and rules. It tells you to write down what you are building before you build it, to look for contradictions in your plan, to test before you ship. It cannot tell whether you did any of that well, because it cannot read what you wrote.
An example. Say the process tells you to write a short description of every feature, and you do. Halfway down, your description says customers can cancel at any time. Three pages later it says a cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing month. Both sentences obey the process. Nothing in a document will notice that they disagree, and whoever builds it will pick one, probably without knowing the other exists.
A document also stays exactly as it was published. It knows what its author knew then. When somebody somewhere discovers a new way projects go wrong, the copy on your machine never finds out.