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A sufficiently detailed spec is code
291–300 of 376 posts
Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
In get the sense that what you are responding to and even many comments to yours are expressing a kind of coping with the current dynamic, only exacerbated by the rather elitist and egoistic mentality that people in tech have had for a very long time now; i.e., they are falling…being pushed from Mt Olympus and there is A LOT of anxious rationalization going on. Not a mere 5 years ago even tech people were chortling d…
I use AI for my work every single day - and during some weekends too. Claude Code, with Opus. It is far from being able to reliably produce the code that we need for production. It produces code that looks ok most of the time, but I have seen it lose track of key details, misinterpret requisites and even ignore them sometimes - "on purpose", as in it writing something like "let's not do that requirement, it's not nec…
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Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#293> Misconception 1: specification documents are simpler than the corresponding code
Anyone who studied software engineering, should know that specification doesn’t bother with implementation details of the underlying technology.
Things such as quite specific engine are used, are the contents of an encapsulated subsystem.
Proper software engineering specification is incompatible with a hacker culture and picking technology beforehand is a bad practice. It’s much closer to waterfall than to C4.
However, the last 20 years we got software building blocks which impose system architectural restrictions: frameworks. And also pieces of software which are half cooked systems.
Far are the days of requirements, preconditions, postconditions and invariants, network diagrams and entity relationship models.
Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#294[flagged]
Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#295> A sufficiently detailed spec is code Posting something like this in 2026: they must not have heard of LLMs. And also: this is such a typical thing a functional programmer would say: for them code is indeed a specification, with strictly no clue (or a vague high level idea at most) as to how the all effing machine it runs on will actually conduct the work. This is not what code is for real folks with real problems t…
Author here: not only have I heard of LLMs but I built a domain-specific programming language for prompt engineering: https://github.com/Gabriella439/grace
Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#296I think it's only a matter of time before people start trying to optimize model performance and token usage by creating their own more technical dialect of English (LLMSpeak or something). It will reduce both ambiguity and token usage by using a highly compressed vocabulary, where very precise concepts are packed into single words (monads are just monoids in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?). Grammat…
I do this already, it's called Python.
Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#297> There is no world where you input a document lacking clarity and detail and get a coding agent to reliably fill in that missing clarity and detail That is not true, and the proof is that LLMs _can_ reliably generate (relatively small amounts of) working code from relatively terse descriptions. Code is the detail being filled in. Furthermore, LLMs are the ultimate detail fillers, because they are language interpolat…
We do have such detailed specifications. But they are written in a language with a narrow interface. It’s a technique called, “program synthesis,” and you can find an example of such a language called, Synquid . It might be illuminating to see what a mathematically precise specification can and cannot do when it comes to generating programs. A major challenge in formal methods is proving that the program implements t…
I think the worst case is actually that the LLM faithfully implements your spec, but your spec was flawed. To the extent that you outsource the mechanical details to a machine trained to do exactly what you tell it, you destroy or at least hamper the feedback loop between fuzzy human thoughts and cold hard facts.
Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#298I've been trying codex and claude code for the past month or so. Here's the workflow that I've ended up with for making significant changes. - Define the data structures in the code yourself. Add comments on what each struct/enum/field does. - Write the definitions of any classes/traits/functions/interfaces that you will add or change. Either leave the implementations empty or write them yourself if they end up being…
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Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#299If you think of yourself as a "programmer" or "coder" I think it's fair to say you might have incorrectly defined your role already. Your job is to design and implement software solutions that are reliable and compliant, and make business processes more efficient. Writing code should really be a relatively small piece of the puzzle, and arguably if you're spending a lot of time writing code, you're wasting time. Writ…
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Re: A sufficiently detailed spec is code
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not correct. They can say "sorry" which makes them as accountable as ordinary developer.
That's not what accountability is
Accountability: "Something that SWE's run screaming from".
Example: "We should have professional accountability in software"
SWE: "This would bring about the end of the world!!!1!"