What is meant by 'Seat of your pants coding'?

Question

I hear a lot of reference made to 'seat of your pants' coding, but I've never fully understood what it means. Can someone please explain?

Answer 1

you know how driving by the seat of your pants? i.e., you could crash any minute....

Answer 2

Coding "on the fly", or without a predetermined specification.

This is generally seen as bad, however is very often done, simply because you get all the basic functionality quick... the problem lies in modification, since your overall design is not set before implementation.

Answer 3

What everybody else does. We're better than that, of course.

Answer 4

It's a reference to the phrase "fly by the seat of your pants," meaning: "decide what you're going to do as you go along" as opposed to planning it out beforehand.

Answer 5

Programming and only thinking as far ahead as the next key press

Answer 6

As others have stated, it's a lack of a planning; more concisely, a lack of any sort of requirements gathering, project specifications, or any design effort at all.

Answer 7

It's what you end up doing when the customer changes the spec 100s of times and your boss lets him.

Answer 8

Sounds more like sitting on your keyboard while Emacs is the frontmost application ;) Result is the same though - bad quality code

Answer 9

Flying by the seat of one's pants was in fact something that all pilots had to do in the early days - they had no instruments, so had to feel whether the aircraft was in balance or not (ie not slipping or skidding through the air).

As a pilot, this can be felt literally through the seat of one's pants, since you feel the slight sideways movement as a pull to one side or the other.

So originally, being able to fly by the seat of one's pants indicated a high degree of awareness, sensitivity and skill. It had nothing to do with navigation, or deciding where to go without planning.

Sadly, as many have commented, this is not normally what is meant when using the phrase in the context of coding.

I would say, though, that as a programmer, even with all the planning in the world, you do (or should do) develop an instinctive sensitivity to a solution that's going wrong, while coding is underway. Sometimes if it's too hard, for instance, it's the wrong approach, and all too few people back off and look for the easier, better solution, instead of battling through code that ends up as a monster.

So I'd say, that coding by the seat of your pants, in its original meaning, is a good thing, and often sadly lacking.