Programming

My original comment was flippant, but you’re fightin for your life with earnesty in these replies, so I’m gonna provide what little IRL experience I have in this so far.

Spec driven development is better than ephemeral prompting in the short term while building up… but for maintenance, it works against you.

Once the code has been generated from the spec, the two inevitably drift apart.

Even for humans, this is a problem. Stale docs can waste time and mislead developers, so the best spec is one that is executable to confirm that it still matches the implementation.

But for agents, it’s especially important, because they have a harder time detecting stale docs and disregarding them, and also because LLMs corrupt documents over time, so they will invariably cause this problem.

So the best spec turns out to be tests. Which means your spec is gonna be code, not natural language. (Djikstra has some insight there.)

Which means you need it to be easy to write tests as a human. Which means you need to aggressively refactor. Which agents are not great at doing.

But even if they were, the dirty secret about refactoring is that it’s heavily dependent on having a good taxonomy for your subject matter, which is a people problem and not a coding problem.

My own sense of this landscape is that AI is effective in two radically different scenarios:

1. Tasks with unambiguous acceptance criteria that can be quickly, automatically, and deterministically checked. You can let it go nuts against that kind of task, as long as it’s not allowed to move its own goalposts.
2. Tasks with trusted inputs and subjective outputs, like information-gathering. The key here is that a human will consume the output and then produce something else as the next step, not simply hand it off as gospel to an artificial implementer.

I took a course where the capstone was to achieve Ralph Loop Nirvana, to show the suits that I’m willing to play along. But I’m unconvinced. If you let AI consume input that is mostly AI-generated, it seems to inevitably deteriorate.

There’s no avoiding it: you simply must get your hands dirty in order to keep things organized, and that’s at odds with any of these “your new job is to be a manager, or SME, or PM, or whatever” tactics.