Design Document Gaps Foster Engineer Decision-Making and Issue Discovery

Arpit Bhayani

Arpit Bhayani

Jun 18, 2026 • 1 min read


I leave gaps in a design doc on purpose because, if I do not, I am treating my teammates as hands, not brains.

The common belief is that a design doc should be detailed enough for an SDE 1 to pick up and implement without thinking. I do not agree with that. If every decision has already been made, the engineer implementing it is just transcribing your thoughts into code, which has now become a commodity.

When I leave gaps, two things happen. The engineer feels trusted to make real decisions, not just execute someone else’s. And often, they find issues in my thinking that I missed entirely because they are now co-owning it.

I am explicit about this when I hand off a doc. I tell them directly that there are gaps and that I expect them to resolve some of them during implementation.

This is a very conscious choice I make. See if you would like to try the same.

Arpit Bhayani

Principal Engineer II at Razorpay - building Agent Studio, Ex-staff engg at GCP Memorystore & Dataproc, Creator of DiceDB, ex-Amazon Fast Data, ex-Director of Engg. SRE and Data Engineering at Unacademy. I spark engineering curiosity through my no-fluff engineering videos on YouTube and my courses