I didn't read the paper, just the linked article, so maybe I don't get what the big revelation here is. Intuition is great as long as it is documented. If you're making a series of implicit decisions based on your prior experience and nobody else on your team knows that you've made them and what they are, it's actually a disaster waiting to happen when eventually a requirement changes and something needs to be rebuilt. That's why strong typing and TDD exists. Humans eventually make errors somewhere and it's a fact of life and these are the tools to help them make less errors and/or to catch them sooner.