How It Works
The Rocket Must Fly
An engineering maxim: a design must actually work in practice, not just look right on paper. “The rocket must fly” — it is not enough for it to have an elegant blueprint. In software and AI development it stands for the principle that empirical results (does it run, does it pass tests, does it serve the user) outrank theoretical elegance.
Origin · no single documented coiner
From the c2 wiki (WikiWikiWeb), the original pattern wiki for software engineering, on a page titled “Theoretical Rigor Can’t Replace Empirical Rigor.” The c2 wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in 1995; the page has no single author, and the phrase is community writing.