In my experience, some projects are very suited to discovery coding.
For my Machine Learning projects, I usually run a bunch of experiments either using pytest or directly on jupyter. I tend to plot out stuff and try out different types of feature engineering. Once I have nailed the approach, I then port a subset of this to a different jupyter notebook or python script, which is cleaner and more readable. This is because ML experiments are compute bottlenecked. So I want to ensure I spend enough time to pick the best features and model.
At work (which is not ML-related), I tend to do much less discovery coding because most of the unknowns are business related - does this API (owned by another team) scale, what is the correct place for this business logic etc. And, doing a viable Proof of Concept is time consuming, so I'd rather spend the time sweating out the nitty-gritties with product. The Discovery here must happen in the discussion with Product or other stakeholders because that is the expensive part. This is also why Product changing the Spec once the project is underway is infuriating. Sometimes a good chunk of the discovery is nullified.
For my Machine Learning projects, I usually run a bunch of experiments either using pytest or directly on jupyter. I tend to plot out stuff and try out different types of feature engineering. Once I have nailed the approach, I then port a subset of this to a different jupyter notebook or python script, which is cleaner and more readable. This is because ML experiments are compute bottlenecked. So I want to ensure I spend enough time to pick the best features and model.
At work (which is not ML-related), I tend to do much less discovery coding because most of the unknowns are business related - does this API (owned by another team) scale, what is the correct place for this business logic etc. And, doing a viable Proof of Concept is time consuming, so I'd rather spend the time sweating out the nitty-gritties with product. The Discovery here must happen in the discussion with Product or other stakeholders because that is the expensive part. This is also why Product changing the Spec once the project is underway is infuriating. Sometimes a good chunk of the discovery is nullified.