Agreed. I don't think anyone can produce useful code without understanding what it should do.
One useful dimension to consider team organization is the "lone genius" to "infinite monkeys on typewriters" axis. Agile as usually practised, microservices, and other recent techniques seem to me to be addressing the "monkey on typewriters" end of the spectrum. Smalltalk and Common Lisp were built around the idea of putting amazing tools in the hands of a single or small group of devs. There are still things that address this group (e.g. it's part of Rails philosophy) but it is less prominent.
One useful dimension to consider team organization is the "lone genius" to "infinite monkeys on typewriters" axis. Agile as usually practised, microservices, and other recent techniques seem to me to be addressing the "monkey on typewriters" end of the spectrum. Smalltalk and Common Lisp were built around the idea of putting amazing tools in the hands of a single or small group of devs. There are still things that address this group (e.g. it's part of Rails philosophy) but it is less prominent.