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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

#61

Post by wiseowise »

hansmayer wrote: post #52
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…

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.

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

#62

Post by wiseowise »

jwpapi wrote: post #26

And once you’ve written all these specs you realize it became so slow that it’s faster to do it yourself in editor

But have you thought about “fun factor”? It’s where you sit like an addict in a casino for weeks and burn tokens in a hope of winning a software that you could’ve written? Who doesn’t consider “fun” thinking about work crap all the time, writing to your agent, verifying walls of slop?

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

#63

Post by geoffbp »

wiseowise wrote: post #53

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…

I think people find joy in trying to optimise (maxxxxxx) their setup be it editor AI note taking etc. They make time for it

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

#64

Post by wiseowise »

fudgeonastick wrote: post #17
wesselbindt wrote: post #7

I'm still confused as to why folks don't just write executable specs.

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!).

I’m using Opus 4.6 and I’m so confused! Maybe I should try Opus 4.7, which is almost twice as expensive to get some clarity (but not too much, I need to save money for Opus 4.8)?

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

#65

Post by taffydavid »

I just spent a week training up in spec driven development through bmad, which was awful, and speckit which was ok but not great. Both had what seemed like unnecessary ceremony around the specs, generating fields of spec documents which presumably fill up the context window quickly. I just kept thinking "this should be using something simpler, all this markdown is unnecessary"

This seems like the answer to that thought!

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

#66

Post by wiseowise »

hansmayer wrote: post #45

> We are entering the post-slop era. My software is more robust, better tested, better integrated, and more observable than ever before. And my velocity keeps increasing! Don't we just love the hard fact conclusions based on sample size N=1 and hand-waving arguments?

They’re at the forefront of the industry. Catch up, slowpoke!

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

#67

Post by wiseowise »

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.

No need to apologize, just don’t act surprised when people call you out.

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

#69

Post by kennyloginz »

energy123 wrote: post #30
gnat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgot to add: I get several benefits from doing this. 1. Specifications that live outside the code. We have a lot of code for which "what should this do?" is a subjective answer, because "what was this written to do?" is either oral legend or lost in time. As future Claude sessions add new features, this is how Claude can remember what was intentional in the existing code and what were accidents of implementation. A…

I do (1) the same but (2) differently. In my workflow, (2) are AI generated specs using human written (1) as the input. It's an intermediate stage between (1) and the codebase, allowing for a gradual token expansion from 30k to 250k to the final code which is 2-3M. The benefit I've found with this approach is it gives the AI a way to iterate on the details of whole system in one context window, whereas fitting the wh…

Jfc

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

#70

Post by IceDane »

augment_me wrote: post #12

Completely subjective take, but I feel like 95% of these "tools" that are prompt-engineering inventions created by the authors with their bias and to suit their needs don't have anything supporting them besides the authors' subjective experience. I have seen the same idea with processes, pipelines, lists, bullet points, jsons, yamls, trees, prioritization queues all for LLM context and instruction alignment. It's lik…

It's like horoscopes for the entirely-too-AI-pilled. Founded in nothing but vibes.

"Don't write prompts like that, do it like this! I swear it's better. Claude says so!"

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