Comment by ur-whale
3 days ago
I agree that most natural languages are a very poor tool to write code specification in.
Specifically, natural language is:
- ambiguous (LLMs solve this to a certain extent)
- extremely verbose
- doesn't lend itself well to refactoring
- the same thing can be expressed in way too many different ways, which leads to instability in specs -> code -> specs -> code -> specs loops (and these are essential to do incremental work)
Having something at our disposal that you can write code specs in, that is as easy as natural language yet, more concise, easy to learn and most of all not so anal/rigid as typical code languages are would be fantastic.
Maybe LLMs can be sued to design such a thing ?
> Maybe LLMs can be sued to design such a thing
nice misspelling (or a joke?), related to all the lawsuits around LLMs.
Joking aside, it’s already there in a sense. Several times I started with a brief outline of what the prototype should do (an HTML/CSS/JS app), and sure enough, refinements and corrections followed. When the final version worked more or less as expected, I asked the LLM to create a specification (a reproducing prompt) of everything we made together. Even if the vibe-coded prototype is dropped, the time wasn’t wasted, I probably would never have come to the same bullet list specification without having an actual working app at my disposal to test and evaluate. So paradoxically this specification even might be used by a human later