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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

#141
post #134

Why is the vibecoding crowd still holding onto the idea that markdown (or here yml) is a better spec then code ? Seriously, it's just not Write your code like it's your spec and your software will be more stable, maintainable clearer to read. Code is not transient, it is your friggin spec itself And if your code isn't structured like it's a spec, then your code is garbage from the perspective of LLM driven developmen…

[deleted]

Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML

#142
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between this and Jira. Your specs already live somewhere, it's where you defined them. That's why it's nice to put the Jira ticket number in your code / commit, so you can refer back to the spec when something breaks

Jira is only a set of changes though. What happens on a long (10+ year) and complex (10+) developer project with many changes and revisions? Eventually you need an explicit specification that itself has a "current state", and a change log. Theoretically you could generate this from Jira, but in my experience it eventually became a mess on any larger project that didn't have explicit and maintained writen requirements…

Jira has current state and a change log. The proposal here is "use yaml instead of jira." Same damn thing, same damn mess.

Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML

#143
post #54
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between this and Jira. Your specs already live somewhere, it's where you defined them. That's why it's nice to put the Jira ticket number in your code / commit, so you can refer back to the spec when something breaks

What about when you migrate away from Jira, or when there’s a Cloudflare outage?

1) export 2) backup

Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML

#145
post #134

Why is the vibecoding crowd still holding onto the idea that markdown (or here yml) is a better spec then code ? Seriously, it's just not Write your code like it's your spec and your software will be more stable, maintainable clearer to read. Code is not transient, it is your friggin spec itself And if your code isn't structured like it's a spec, then your code is garbage from the perspective of LLM driven developmen…

The idea is that the spec is somehow compressed in comparison to the code.

Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML

#146

Wow - I love programming in YAML! You know what would make this really fun? Sprinkle in some Jinja. Then we'll be cooking with gas.

I started reading to find out why Yaml? In it's place I found a great post.

One thing though, I loved the "AUTH-1" numbering and the Yaml breaks that into an Auth section, with "1." subsection which I don't like nearly as much, the codification AUTH-1 is more referenceable/searchable.

Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML

#147

What is it with people and procrastinating with the most useless shit you can imagine? First it was choice of editor: people were micro optimizing every aspect of their typing experience, editor wars where people would literally slaughter over suggesting another camp. Editor wars v2: IDEs arrived and second editor war began. Revenge of the note taking apps: Obsidian/Roam/Joplin/Apple Notes/Logseq. Just one plugin, ju…

[deleted]

Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t be ridiculous, that would be extremely hard. Oppressive even, because it’s unattainable to an average person. And it is, otherwise there would be millions of programmers in the world. Was it unattainable or “we have to pay these suckers money, and they have rights and lives outside of work”? Bah! Just make sure to renew your subscription, agent will do the thinking and you bring the money.

But Paul Graham says that the guy from Replit whom he funded told him the source code is "object code" now, so we don't need to look at it all ? It must be utter wisdom since PG managed to get wealthy by selling some website during dotcom-mania so he must have insights we are missing?

Heathen. And you dare to say this on a website created by the guy?

Re: Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML

#150
post #134

Why is the vibecoding crowd still holding onto the idea that markdown (or here yml) is a better spec then code ? Seriously, it's just not Write your code like it's your spec and your software will be more stable, maintainable clearer to read. Code is not transient, it is your friggin spec itself And if your code isn't structured like it's a spec, then your code is garbage from the perspective of LLM driven developmen…

I think you are confusing the spec as "this is how it must be built", as opposed to, "this is what the software must do and must not do to be acceptable".

To me saying "the code is the spec" is like saying "the business wants it this way because that's how the code is written". Which is obviously backwards.

Does the business mandate we use a cache for this hot path? No, but the business set performance targets, and the cache was a sensible way to satisfy them. See the difference?

I believe that the 'musts' and 'must nots' deserve special attention, and need to be recorded well before I decide on the 'how'. Every team does this differently. I find that writing itemized, functional acceptance criteria is practical way to marry the two domains. I also think the process matters a lot more now, because the temptation to let an agent ship it is increasing and the tedium of maintaining these specs is decreasing.

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