On the one hand I want to believe in spec driven development - I think there’s this awkward gap between code and not code that is the cause of the sort of “code review crisis” that gets written about a lot. And
But the reason you don’t have to read assembly when you write in a higher language is that, over time that abstraction has become largely complete and is deterministic.
Like when you write I dunno Python to add two numbers and calls class, that spec is universal and agreed upon. ~99.99% of the time when you read Python documentation, and replicate it, it does what the designers intended.
Spec driven development is none of those things. So while I’d like to see people experiment with higher level languages, I think many folks find there’s now way to consistently reconcile the spec with the code.
As much as no one wants to read the code anymore, it seems like most people seem to agree it’s the only source of truth.
Hmm, yeah I guess the issue really is that the spec is not comprehensive enough to guarantee one specific implementation. If the spec really did translate one-to-one then the spec would really become a higher level language
Nowadays you can just start with a plan.md and add everything you want there, verification etc
And you can build a loop to verify/validate it in case its a big/long-running plan
I don't have the problems you mentioned that the models aren't able to follow instructions throughoutly, they do make some mistakes, but it's up to you to set up a process that would work for your codebase to understand that the mistakes were made and need to be fixed, that can be done in a loop for example.
On the one hand I want to believe in spec driven development - I think there’s this awkward gap between code and not code that is the cause of the sort of “code review crisis” that gets written about a lot. And
But the reason you don’t have to read assembly when you write in a higher language is that, over time that abstraction has become largely complete and is deterministic.
Like when you write I dunno Python to add two numbers and calls class, that spec is universal and agreed upon. ~99.99% of the time when you read Python documentation, and replicate it, it does what the designers intended.
Spec driven development is none of those things. So while I’d like to see people experiment with higher level languages, I think many folks find there’s now way to consistently reconcile the spec with the code.
As much as no one wants to read the code anymore, it seems like most people seem to agree it’s the only source of truth.
Hmm, yeah I guess the issue really is that the spec is not comprehensive enough to guarantee one specific implementation. If the spec really did translate one-to-one then the spec would really become a higher level language
Agents are already too good, the models improved
Nowadays you can just start with a plan.md and add everything you want there, verification etc
And you can build a loop to verify/validate it in case its a big/long-running plan
I don't have the problems you mentioned that the models aren't able to follow instructions throughoutly, they do make some mistakes, but it's up to you to set up a process that would work for your codebase to understand that the mistakes were made and need to be fixed, that can be done in a loop for example.