Is Waterfall Coming Back? Sort Of. Not Really. Both — And the Bigger Question Underneath.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:01 -0800

There’s a thing going around the engineering blogs and Hacker News right now: AI killed Agile, Waterfall is back, write your specs up front, welcome to “Waterfall 2.0.” You may have seen the Medium piece titled Agile Is Dead. AI Killed It. Welcome Back, Waterfall.. Hmmm.

And once I followed the logic far enough, I ran into a second question that nobody seems to want to answer out loud: if the agent writes the code, who actually reads it?

Waterfall on Greg Herlein

Is Waterfall Coming Back? Sort Of. Not Really. Both — And the Bigger Question Underneath.