Ask HN: Is it still worth building and documenting projects the "old way"?

That very much depends on what you mean by the old way. When I first started the old way Documenting meant you write very complex design documents up front, which inevitably in the first hour we discovered something very critical and important that was not in it and within a couple days the documents were completely unrelated to the reality of what we were implementing. By the end of the week, there was a large first of the document that still had to be implemented, but the document was so divorced from the reality of what the code was that it was useless to refer to.

However, instead you're referring to documenting as a few smart people stand in front of a whiteboard for a couple hours and sketch out the details. That is a valuable activity. Just remember that within a couple days you need to erase that whiteboard because it's useless anyway. These days I would use an LLM to help me create that, especially if it's a part i work on alone. However, it's only a help and I understand again that this is a guide to get me started but it won't match reality and so I'm not going to share it with others.

Sure you can. AI needs inspiration to steal from and the material is getting very stale. Please make your reasoning as public as possible.