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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

#161

Post by oblio »

hansmayer wrote: post #78
wiseowise wrote: post #61

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?

> PG managed to get wealthy by selling some website during dotcom-mania

I don't remember how much he made selling the "quickly-killed startup bought by now failed internet giant".

But I'm fairly sure how much money he made building something other people used is peanuts compared to what he made investing early in companies where others built things, instead of him.

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

#162

Post by kibwen »

brendanmc6 wrote: post #150
ffsm8 wrote: 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 t…

> 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?

This seems confused. Specs are free to include as much or as little detail as they deem necessary. If a spec only wants to suggest vague performance goals and handwave the details, that's permitted. But if specs want to specify the exact means by which performance will be guaranteed, that's also permitted. And this isn't an anti-pattern, this is often very useful. For example, plenty of APIs in the real world specify algorithmic upper bounds for time and space consumption, which is useful in that they allow downstream consumers to have a greater understanding of what sort of performance their own systems will exhibit despite the API itself being a black box in other respects.

So the answer to the original question definitely isn't "no", it's "maybe, depending on the sort of guarantees we want to provide to our users".

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

#163

Post by brendanmc6 »

dotneter wrote: post #124

I didn’t quite understand why YAML is better than Markdown for such specifications. If the specification is written in such a strict format as YAML, I would expect it to be executable, something like this https://blog.fooqux.com/blog/executable-specification/ But as far as I understood, for acai that is not the case.

Here is how I got from Markdown to YAML in a few easy steps:

1. Start with unmaintainable prompt.

  Add auth to the admin route. It must only be accessible to team members. It must not be accessible to team members with the `quarantine` role. Unauthorized users should be redirected to the /login page, with query param `?error=unauthorized`. Requires fresh session, no older than 10 minutes.
2. Put it in a structured .md spec of some kind

  # Feat: Admin Route

  ## Auth requirements

  * [ ] Accessible to team members.
  * [ ] Not be accessible to members with `quarantine` role.
  * [ ] Redirects unauthorized users to /login
    * [ ] Redirect path includes `?error=unauthorized`
  * [ ] Requires fresh session, no older than 10 minutes.
But how do you cross reference the requirements? Give them stable IDs?

  # Feat: Admin Route

  ## Requirements

  AUTH.1: Accessible to team members.
  AUTH.2: Not be accessible to members with `quarantine` role.
  AUTH.3: Redirects unauthorized users to /login.
    AUTH.3.1: Redirect path includes `?error=unauthorized`.
  AUTH.4: Requires fresh session, no older than 10 minutes.
Might as well clean it up and make it machine readable at that point?

  feature:
    name: admin-route

  requirements:
    AUTH:
      1: Accessible to team members.
      2: Not be accessible to members with `quarantine` role.
      3: Redirects unauthorized users to /login.
      3-1: Redirect path includes `?error=unauthorized`.
      4: Requires fresh session, no older than 10 minutes.
```

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

brendanmc6 wrote: post #150
ffsm8 wrote: 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 t…

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by rogermarley »

ffsm8 wrote: 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…

Exactly. There's little gap between a spec that's been written to the level of detail needed and just code. There's some, but it's not a big gap after decades of umpteen new frameworks and languages and new forms of abstraction.

The core of the misunderstanding is between new builds and making changes to existing builds (where most software dev work actually happens). Yes, you'll get a great headstart with a detailed spec for a new build. The issue is in the hundreds of changes that'll follow that.

Do people think that the desire to make shortcuts and do minimum effort changes is going to stop just because you've got a bit-more-natural-language-looking spec? And then with an AI underneath making probabilistic changes to code that's now basically a compile target - they really think the dev pace isn't going to collapse, but just faster and with a big ongoing inference bill?

The LLM's do not form mental models. You are not going to get a better results from an LLM vibe coding against spec diffs vs a dev prompting it from a position of understanding the codebase and the requested change.

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

#166

Post by matthova »

Generally excited to try it out. The only thing that gives me pause is the idea of asking Claude to install a specific package. I know this is a bit naive as I’m probably downloading so many other things without my knowledge, but planning to read/fork the source before running any install commands

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

#167

Post by brentcrude »

ffsm8 wrote: 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…

[dead]

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

#168

Post by musebox35 »

ffsm8 wrote: 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…

Not all parts of the code is equal in this respect. Those parts pertaining to the user visible portion (API of a library, command args of a CLI, UI of a GUI/TUI app, endpoints in a web service, etc.) are closely related to the spec. The rest is more fluid as long as it does not change user visible behavior. The choices still affect maintenance and debugging costs, so there is some pressure to not YOLO these portions. I think the most difficult design decisions relate to how to separate the two and how to ensure a smooth evolution of both user facing and programmer facing design decisions.

What is different now is that maintainability and debugging design decisions were made w.r.t. human coders or teams in the past which is not necessarily the case anymore. Should we just specify the API and let agents figure the rest or do we still want to control the rest to ensure maintenance and security? A year ago I definitely thought so. Now it is more murky as the agents are faster browsers of codebases and can explore runtime effects faster than I can type and parse output. Strongest empirical observations depend on the runtime behavior so they have an edge there.

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

#169

Post by smokel »

ffsm8 wrote: 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…

No, code is not the same as a specification. There are a lot of accidental implementation details that the customer may not require. By making the code the specification, you end up with those details becoming requirements, and you can then no longer change that implementation.

Having functional behavior and implementation details separate can be really useful, even though it is typically a pain to keep them in sync.

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

#170

Post by lelanthran »

brendanmc6 wrote: post #150
ffsm8 wrote: 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 t…

> 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".

You can't enforce a "do not do this" to an LLM. Just putting it in the context by saying "don't do this" makes it more likely that it will eventually do that.

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