SpecForge – A Platform for Authoring Formal Specifications

I have been thinking about how to write specifications for an AI agent to write code for a new project with detailed requirements. I was simply going write it as a list of requirements, starting at REQ001, one beneath the other, with subsequent requirements also building upon prior ones. The developed code would be intended to mark as a comment where in the code each individual requirement is implemented. There might also exist one primary unit test for each requirement. If tests are to not be implemented, then a human is more closely responsible for reviewing changes to the implementation. Over time, I would update/insert/delete individual requirements, and gaps may come to exist in their numbering, but this is okay. The numbers are sorted identifiers only, so a new requirement can even be added as say REQ033B. Overall, this is not a formal system, and it's loose enough that any human and any AI can work with it. For a formal system, an AI may even translate my prose into a formal definition language that it is familiar with, of which there are many. In conclusion, I don't think it's the job of a human to write specifications in a formal spec language.

Tend to adopt RFC standards for specs, works pretty well. My general rule of thumb is describe scope/concerns/interfaces at a high level, details at any wanted depth. That makes the LLM generated code reasonably stable and bounds it to a clearly defined boundary. Whatever ambiguity is left in details is then treated "expectedly unstable".