Customer writes features may not work. But writing features and asking customers to confirm that the description matches their expectations works a lot better.

I've used Cucumber for years, and I've never had a customer write a feature. Customers reading features after I've written them and checking them works much better in my experience.

Couldn't you do the same with RSpec or straight Capybara code?

I no longer see the added value of Cucumber when you work in a project that has no non-technical team members writing tests.

If I go to my stakeholders and customers with Spec or Unit code, and ask them: "Does this test represent your idea of how this feature should work" I'll get no useful answers.

I can read it to them, or we could collaborate on a user story that doesn't get directly mapped to tests, but then we have room for the interpretation/translation process to create the wrong assumptions in the test code.

There are plenty of tests I'd never show the customer because they involve implementation details, and those aren't going to be written in Gherkin because I don't hate myself enough to juggle that many regexps.

The value is when you have non-technical members reading tests.

The gherkin language is nice to describe features. I've worked in environment where business analysts did exactly that. As for making them executable scenarios... this never panned out for the reasons described in the article. It doesn't add any value.