> If I had to roll out such a development process today, I’d make a standardized Markdown specification the new unit of knowledge for the software project. Product owners and engineers could initially collaborate on this spec and on test cases to enforce business rules. Those should be checked into the project repositories along with the implementing code. There would need to be automated pull-request checks verifying not only that tests pass but that code conforms to the spec. This specification, and not the code that materializes it, is what the team would need to understand, review, and be held accountable for.

The constant urge I have today is for some sort of spec or simpler facts to be continuously verified at any point in the development process; Something agents would need to be aware of. I agree with the blog and think it's going to become a team sport to manage these requirements. I'm going to try this out by evolving my open source tool [1] (used to review specs and code) into a bit more of a collaborative & integrated plane for product specs/facts - https://plannotator.ai/workspaces/

[1] https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator

What we really we need is some kind of more detailed spec language that doesn't have edge cases, where we describe exactly what we expect the generated code to do, and then formally verify that the now generated code matches the input spec requirement. It'd be super helpful to have something more formal with no ambiguity, especially because the english language tends to be pretty ambiguous in general which can result in spec problems

I also tend to find especially that there's a lot of cruft in human written spec languages - which makes them overly verbose once you really get into the details of how all of this works, so you could chop a lot of that out with a good spec language

I nominate that we call this completely novel, evolving discipline: 'programming'

There are languages like Dafny that permit you to declare pre- and post-conditions for functions. Dafny in particular tries to automatically verify or disprove these claims with an SMT solver. It would be neat if LLMs could read a human-written contract and iterate on the implementation until it's provably correct. I imagine you'd have much higher confidence in the results using this technique, but I doubt that available models are trained appropriately for this use case.

yes, am familiar with the "code is spec" trope.

Shame us all for moving away from something so perfect, precise, and that "doesn't have edge cases."

Hey - if you invent a programming language that can be used in such a way and create guaranteed deterministic behavior based on expressed desires as simple as natural language - ill pay a $200/m subscription for it.

As people are discovering, natural language is insufficiently precise to be able to specify edge cases. Any language precise enough to be formally verified against is a programming language

we're going to end up speaking past each other - but generally I do agree with you and am not denouncing the importance of formal verification methods. I do think abstractions are going to dominate the human ux above them

> where we describe exactly what we expect the generated code to do, and then formally verify that the now generated code matches the input spec requirement.

In ancient times we had tech to do exactly that: Programming languages and tests.

We've been through that so many times. When UML arrived (and ALM tools suites, IBM was trying to sell it, Borland was trying to sell it, all those fancy and expensive StarTeam, Caliber and Together soft), then BPML and its friends arrived, Business Rule Management System (BRMS), Drools in Java world, etc.

It all failed. For a simple reason, popularized by Joel Spolsky: if you want to create specification that describes precisely what software is doing and how it is doing its job, then, well, you need to write that damn program using MS Word or Markdown, which is neither practical nor easy.

The new buzzword is "spec driven development", maybe it will work this time, but I would not bet on that right now.

BTW: when we will be at this point, it does not make sense anymore to generate code in programming languages we have today, LLM can simply generate binaries or at least some AST that will be directly translated to binary. In this way LISP would, eventually, take over the world!.

I’ve been considering this as well, and trying to get my colleagues to understand and start doing it. I use it to pretty decent effect in my vibe coded slop side projects.

In the new world of mostly-AI code that is mostly not going to be properly reviewed or understood by humans, having a more and more robust manifestation and enforcement, and regeneration of the specs via the coding harness configuration combined with good old fashioned deterministic checks is one potential answer.

Taken to an extreme, the code doesn’t matter, it’s just another artifact generated by the specs, made manifest through the coding harness configuration and CI. If cost didn’t matter, you could re-generate code from scratch every time the specs/config change, and treat the specs/config as the new thing that you need to understand and maintain.

“Clean room code generation-compiler-thing.”

> Rework is almost free

Is it? All the electricity and capital investment in computing hardware costs real money. Is this properly reflected in the fees that AI companies charge or is venture capital propping each one up in the hope that they will kill off the competition before they run out of (usually other people's) money?

Yeah, a lot of Claude Code users(me included) found in March if rework is free or not.

The underlying mechanism is still the same: humans type and products come out.

So something which must be true if this author is right is that whatever the new language is—the thing people are typing into markdown—must be able to express the same rigor in less words than existing source code.

Otherwise the result is just legacy coding in a new programming language.

> Otherwise the result is just legacy coding in a new programming language.

And this is why starting with COBOL and through various implementations of CASE tools, "software through pictures" or flowcharts or UML, etc, which were supposed to let business SMEs write software without needing programmers, have all failed to achieve that goal.

While they failed to achieve the goal outright, I'd argue that each is a concrete step towards it. The languages we have today are more productive than the languages we had decades ago.

I think it's an open question of whether we achieve the holy grail language as the submission describes. My guess is that we inch towards the submission's direction, even if we never achieve it. It won't surprise me if new languages take LLMs into account just like some languages now take the IDE experience into account.

> must be able to express the same rigor in less words than existing source code

Yes but also no. Writing source means rigorously specifying the implementation itself in deep detail. Most of the time, the implementation does not need to be specified with this sort of rigor. Instead the observable behavior needs to be specified rigorously.

That doesn't sound right. For example, there's plenty of software with the correct observable behavior which leaks credentials. So what needs to be captured goes beyond observable behavior.

I wonder if with the speed of iteration with AI the industry will switch back to waterfall. Clear documentation first so the LLM can easily produce what's being asked with a round of testing before going back to the documentation stage and running it again. History does repeat itself.

We already switched

The lesson I've learned from our new AI age is how little a large number of people who've worked in software development their entire careers understand software development.

I suppose all the money floating around AI helps dummify everything, as people glom on to narratives, regardless of merit, that might position them to partake.

What we actually have now is the ability to bang out decent quality code really fast and cheaply.

This is massive, a huge change, one which upends numerous assumptions about the business of software development.

...and it only leaves us to work through every other aspect of software development.

The approach this article advocates is to essentially pretend none of this exists. Simple, but will rarely produce anything of value.

This paragraph from the post gives you the gist of it:

> ...we need to remove humans-in-the-loop, reduce coordination, friction, bureaucracy, and gate-keeping. We need a virtually infinite supply of requirements, engineers acting as pseudo-product designers, owning entire streams of work, with the purview to make autonomous decisions. Rework is almost free so we shouldn’t make an effort to prevent incorrect work from happening.

As if the only reason we ever had POs or designers or business teams, or built consensus between multiple people, or communicated with others, or reviewed designs and code, or tested software, was because it took individual engineers too long to bang out decent code.

AI has just gotten people completely lost. Or I guess just made it apparent they were lost the whole time?

I appreciate your insights in a sea of psychosis comments. I find it strange how many people think we have achieved the likes of Y2K flying cars 20 years ago, or the dream of having every car on the road be an electric fully self driving car by now (a promise made at least over a decade ago by several of these types).

The point I’m making is that we give the spotlight to people who are making absurd claims. We have not achieved the ability to remove the human from the loop and continually produce value-able outputs. Until we do, I don’t see how any of the claims made in this article are even close to anything more than simply gate-keeping slop.

And if we do remove the human from the loop? What then, what are humans for? Do we get Keynes' idea that we only need to work a few hours a week or do we get a continuation and intensification of what we already have: a few high 'earners' and a sea of people struggling to make ends meet?

This could very well be a pattern that some teams evolve into. Specs are the new source -- they describe the architectural approach, as well as the business rules and user experience details. End to end tests are described here too. This all is what goes through PRs and review process, and the code becomes a build artifact.

It just doesn’t work though. Anthropic couldn’t even get Claude to build a working C compiler which has a way better specification than any team can write and multiple reference implementations.

Entertaining flag name!

React team seems to really have set a precedent with their "dangerouslySetInnerHTML" idea.

Or did they borrow it somewhere?

I'm just curious about that etymology, of course the idea is not universally helpful: for example, for dd CLI parameters, it would only make a mess.

But when there's a flag/option that really requires you to be vigilant and undesired the input and output and all edge cases, calling it "dangerous" is quite a feat!

I’m pretty sure this comes from Claude code’s --dangerously-skip-permissions

which sounds like it came from React's "dangerouslySetInnerHTML", per the comment you replied to.

I found that adding "philosophy" descriptions help guide the tooling. No specs, just general vibes what's the point, because we can't make everyone happy and it's not a goal of a good tool (I believe).

Technology, implementation may change, but general point of "why!?" stays.

I legit can't tell if this article is satire, or not.

> There would need to be automated pull-request checks verifying not only that tests pass but that code conforms to the spec.

As I understand, this is an unsolved problem.

Step 1: solve the halting problem.

Yep, calling it an "unsolved" problem is a misnomer. We already have mathematical proof that it's impossible.

But that aside, it's such a shame that many drinking the AI Kool-Aid aren't even aware of the theoretical limits of a computer's capabilities.

This sort of theoretical result is not always as clear-cut as you suggest.

Computers are finite machines. There is a theorem that although a machine with finite memory can add, multiplication requires unbounded memory. Somehow we muddle along and use computers for multiplication anyway.

More to your point there is a whole field of people who write useful programs using languages in which every program must be accompanied by a proof that it halts on all inputs.

(See for example https://lean-lang.org/ or David Turner's work on Total Functional Programming from about 20 years ago.)

Other examples are easy to find. The simplex algorithm for linear optimization requires exponential time in general, and the problem it solves is NP-hard, but in practice works well on problems of interest and is widely used. Or consider the dynamic programming algorithms for problems like subset-sum.

Theory is important, but engineering is also important.

> There is a theorem that (...) multiplication requires unbounded memory

What theorem is that?

The multiplication of any two integers below a certain size (called "words") fits in a "double word" and the naive multiplication algorithm needs to store the inputs, an accumulator and at most another temporary for a grand total of 6*word_size

Sure, you can technically "stream" carry-addition (which is obvious from the way adders are chained in ALU-101) and thus in a strict sense addition is O(1) memory but towards your final point:

> Theory is important, but engineering is also important.

In practice, addition requires unbounded memory as well (the inputs). And it's definitely compute-unbounded, if your inputs are unbounded.

I dislike the term "we muddle along". IEEE 754 has well specified error bars and cases, and so does all good data science. LLMs do not, or at least they do not expose them to the end user

So then, how exactly do we go about proving that the result of chaining prompts is within a controllable margin of error of the intended result? Because despite all the specs, numerical stability is the reason people don't write their own LAPACK.

But it's not like these systems make theory go away, they make compromises. So the question is, what's the compromise required for an algorithm that can check the conformance of computer programs to natural language specifications that doesn't involve hoping for the best?

You're probably thinking of Rice's theorem (a sort of generalised halting problem), but this task is actually way easier than that, since we're not trying to study arbitrary algorithms: we're trying to study the subset of human-comprehensible algorithms. Most of the things we want computers to do are things that, given enough time, someone can write a program to solve: and generally, those programs are not tricksy or meta, and don't involve unsolved mathematics problems found by studying busy-beaver candidates. If it's possible for a human to understand how a program works (which is a necessary component of writing such a program), it's possible to write a mathematical proof about the program's behaviour, and that means it's in principle possible to automate the construction of that mathematical proof, which is equivalent to the "determine whether code conforms to the spec" task.

"Somewhat easier than an impossible task" is not a particularly strong claim about when (or whether) this problem will be solved, though.

I will give you a class of programs humans wrote and they want improved: LLMs.

Those were written by humans, and don't involve unsolved mathematics.

Is your claim tht you just need to solve comprehensibility of LLMs?

Figuring out epistemology and cognition to have a chance to reason about the outputs of a LLM seems to me way harder that traditional attempts to reason directly about algorithms.

We can't create an algorithm determining whether a computer program halts or not, but we can write one that checks whether it conforms to natural language specifications much more easily? That makes no sense. There's no exception to the halting problem regarding "human comprehensible" computer programs.

They're saying most useful programs don't fall in the complete / correct divide. You can get a lot done while restricting yourself to provable programs

Rice's theorem says that we can't draw a partition between two sets of programs, based on their semantic properties. It says nothing about drawing a partition slightly to one side of the desirable partition, misclassifying some tricksy cases, but correctly classifying all the programs we care about.

this is actually precisely what humans' roles will be.

"is this implementation/code actually aligned with what i want to do?"

humanic responsibility's focus will move entirely from implementing code to deciding whether it should be implemented or not.

u probably mean unsolved as in "not yet able to be automated", and that's true.

if pull-request checks verifying that tests are conforming to the spec are automated, then we'd have AGI.

That's what formal verification is about. I did some (using PSL for hardware verification); writing the formal spec is way harder than the actual code. It will find a lot of subtle issues, and you spend a most of the time deciding if it's the spec or the code that's wrong.

Having the code-writing part automated would have a negligible impact on the total project time.

> humanic

No, thank you

This is a task that humans are exceptionally bad at, because we are not computers. If something uses the right words in the right order such that it communicates the correct algorithm to a human, then a human is likely to say "yup, that's correct", even if an hour's study of these 15 lines reveals that a subtle punctuation choice, or a subtle mismatch between a function's name and its semantics, would reveal that it implements a different algorithm to the expected one.

LLMs do not understand prose or code in the same way humans do (such that "understand" is misleading terminology), but they understand them in a way that's way closer to fuzzy natural language interpretation than pedantic programming language interpretation. (An LLM will be confused if you rename all the variables: a compiler won't even notice.)

So we've built a machine that makes the kinds of mistakes that humans struggle to spot, used RLHF to optimise it for persuasiveness, and now we're expecting humans to do a good job reviewing its output. And, per Kernighan's law:

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

And that's the ideal situation where you're the one who's written it: reading other people's code is generally harder than reading your own. So how do you expect to fare when you're reading nobody's code at all?

The AI's code is not going to be infallible any time soon. It's been "very soon" for the past 4 years, and the AI systems are still making the same kinds of mistakes, which are the mistakes you'd expect from a first-principles study of their model architectures. There's no straightforward path to modifying the systems we have now, to make them infallible.

> Product owners and engineers could initially collaborate on this spec and on test cases to enforce business rules.

LOL. I had to check if this was published on April 1st.

Instead of accepting 20,000 lines of slop per PR (and never-ending combinatorial complexity), maybe we should aim to think about abstractions and how to steer LLMs to generate code similar to that of a skilled human developer. Then it could actually be a maintainable artifact by humans and LLMs alike.

very true. and we already know and agree with this.

user experience/what the app actually does >>> actually implementing it.

elon musk said this a looong time ago. we move from layer 1 (coding, how do we implement this?) to layer 2 thinking (what should the code do? what do we code? should we implement this? (what to code to get the most money?))

this is basic knowledge

Elon Musk has been saying Teslas would have fully autonomous self-driving within 1-3 years since 2013

I left a similar comment elsewhere in this thread. I still remember when so many people hallucinated that we would suddenly have flying cars by 2002 at the latest. If we achieve several more major improvements on current technology, these thoughts are interesting to consider. But not before that occurs.

We need the pragmatic engineer more than ever.