I'm still confused as to why folks don't just write executable specs.
Could you expand on this?
Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
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Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#12Completely subjective take, but I feel like 95% of these "tools" that are prompt-engineering inventions created by the authors with their bias and to suit their needs don't have anything supporting them besides the authors' subjective experience.
I have seen the same idea with processes, pipelines, lists, bullet points, jsons, yamls, trees, prioritization queues all for LLM context and instruction alignment. It's like the authors take the structure they are familiar with, and go 100% in on it until it provides value for them and then they think it's the best thing since sliced bread.
I would like, for once, to see some kind of exploration/abalation against other methods. Or even better, a tool that uses your data to figure out your personal bias and structure preference for writing specs, so that you can have a way of providing yourself value.
Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#13Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#14Author here, if you don't want to read all that, I'll post one excerpt that I think sums it up nicely: > My point is, the spec must live somewhere, even if you don’t write it down. The spec is what you want the software to be. It often exists only in your head or in conversations. You and your team and your business will always care what the spec says, and that’s never going to change. So you’re better off writing it…
Nice! Your spec-maxxing is very resonant. I've been doing working with explicit requirements: elicit them from conversation with me or introspecting another piece of software; one-shot from them; and keep them up-to-date as I do the "old man shouts at Claude" iterations after whatever one-shotting came up with.
Unlike you, I wish for the LLM to do as much of the work as possible -- but "as possible" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I'm still trying to get clear on exactly where I am needed and where Opus and iterations will get there eventually.
It has really challenged me to get clearer on what a requirement is vs a constraint (e.g., "you don't get to reinvent the database schema, we're building part of a larger system"). And I still battle with when and how to specify UI behaviours: so much UI is implicit, and it seems quite daunting to have to specify so much to get it working. I have new respect for whoever wrote the undoubtedly bajillion tests for Flutter and other UI toolkits.
Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#15I use OpenSpec for my spec management, and I scrolled down to the comparison. The gripe seems to be with a semantic difference. Specs describing a current system is the basis for AS/IS Gap Analysis. Also, I mainly pursue these tools so that I can have AI accelerate this process and broker an agreement after negotiating specs with the agent.
I can see one benefit to a structured yaml for specs like the OP is doing: it gives you more control over what you include in the context window. But coming up with a good schema that doesn't handicap you or add cognitive burden, compared to the freeform flexibility of md/txt, is a challenge.
If the selling point is a new file format for spec management, it would be more interesting to provide an offering with org-mode. The author admits they were unaware of other pre-existing solutions before this project so I am providing context to their critique of OpenSpec.
Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#16Wow - I love programming in YAML! You know what would make this really fun? Sprinkle in some Jinja. Then we'll be cooking with gas.
Dreaming about ` | nindent 12` in my specs! :D
Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#17I'm still confused as to why folks don't just write executable specs.
If you're confused, and have tried Opus for coding, I'm keen to hear what problems or workflows it's not good at.
If you're genuinely confused, and haven't tried Opus for coding, then it's not surprising you're confused!
It is also okay for you to just not like the idea of LLMs for coding (but say that!).
Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#18Yesterday I heard about lat.md [1] which seems to have similar ideas about annotating code with spec refs. I now need to try them both.
Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#19Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML
#20I'm still confused as to why folks don't just write executable specs.
So basically tests?