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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

#51

Post by beshrkayali »

brendanmc6 wrote: post #2

Author 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…

I wrote something similar recently about how agent-generated code lacks the institutional memory that human-written code has. There's nobody to ask why a decision was made (1).

“Specsmaxxing” is basically the right response to this. When you can't rely on authorial memory, you have to put the intent somewhere durable. Specs become the source of truth by default if we continue down the road of AI generated code.

1: https://ossature.dev/blog/ai-generated-code-has-no-author/

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

#52

Post by hansmayer »

colinmarc wrote: post #10

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.

:) Here is a crazy thought - what if we had some kind of a narrowed down, specific subset of normal language which would translate into specific computer-level instructions. So for example, instead of telling computer to read something from a file and transform it in a certain way, you actually had a specific instruction to open a file, which worked the same each time you used it and guaranteed to fail if you used it the wrong way? Wow, the possibilities are endless :)

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

#53

Post by wiseowise »

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, just one more knowledge graph, bro, and I’ll have peak productivity. 10x is almost here.

AI: you’re witnessing it now.

Do people NOT have anything else in life? How are y’all finding time to do all of this shit? Are you doing it on company time? Do you have hobbies, do you learn foreign languages, travel, have kids or spouses, drive a car, other thousand “normie” things outside of staring at the freaking monitor or thinking about this shit 24/7? Did I miss the invention of a Time Machine?

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

#54

Post by Diti »

nalpha wrote: post #29
brendanmc6 wrote: post #2

Author 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…

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?

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

#55

Post by hansmayer »

brendanmc6 wrote: post #41
ltbarcly3 wrote: post #36

Grindmaxxing, a long form blog post that is actually just an advertisement for his website.

Should I apologize for being excited about something I built and use daily and for wanting people to try it, discuss it, critique it? Not sure by the tone of your message.

Read the room. What you "built" is neither exciting, nor something most people want to "try". Why? Because just like other AI boosters, you are still trying to somehow optimise the usage of natural language to make it work. But it will never "work" because the way the stochastic ML system is built, it has a failure built into the system.

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

#56

Post by wiseowise »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #42

Where is the part where the author overcomes ai psychosis? Reads like digging in deeper and deeper.

That’s the best part: you don’t. “You would extend the prompt to improve it”. They’ll just ask Claude to write an AI tool to overcome psychosis (the program will spam Anthropic servers with racial slurs which will promptly cause ban of the user, success).

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

#57

Post by cowanon77 »

nalpha wrote: post #29
brendanmc6 wrote: post #2

Author 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…

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.

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

#58

Post by adi_kurian »

oytis wrote: post #27
fudgeonastick wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!).

That's what the article is about - overcoming problems with AI cooding tools using specs in Yaml. If we've got that far, it might be better to write specs in a proper programming language instead and skip the AI layer altogether

Think the idea is to still get monumental acceleration between fancy YAML specs (bullet points with some indentation that an intelligent technical manager could write) and production ready code.

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

#59

Post by brendanmc6 »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #42

Where is the part where the author overcomes ai psychosis? Reads like digging in deeper and deeper.

Fair, I could have made that point clearer. It's a couple things. First is that I finally stopped experimenting with TUIs, harnesses, models, subagents, roles, skills, mcp, md libraries etc. and have mostly settled on this approach, and got back to building other things with it. I'm sure that won't last forever though.

Second is that I'm doing a lot less "seat of my pants prompting" and doing more engineering and ideating, which was a big goal of mine. So I'm feeling less psychotic there too.

And sort of tangentially to that, I think a significant subset of devs actually are willing to just prompt their way to nirvana, day in and day out. I'm not. I think the spec will carry a lot of weight for a long time. Maybe they will get further than I give them credit for? Maybe the whole digital world becomes a single chat box?

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

#60

Post by nicbou »

beshrkayali wrote: post #51
brendanmc6 wrote: post #2

Author 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…

I wrote something similar recently about how agent-generated code lacks the institutional memory that human-written code has. There's nobody to ask why a decision was made (1). “Specsmaxxing” is basically the right response to this. When you can't rely on authorial memory, you have to put the intent somewhere durable. Specs become the source of truth by default if we continue down the road of AI generated code. 1: ht…

I had a similar experience refactoring a large codebase• The only thing that made it possible was that each commit message had a JIRA ticket number tying it to a requirement or task. I could find the people behind the business logic and ask them about it.
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