Comment by klodolph
2 days ago
> Once an AI can reliably regenerate an implementation from specification…
I’m sorry but it feels like I got hit in the head when I read this, it’s so bad. For decades, people have been dreaming of making software where you can just write the specification and don’t have to actually get your hands dirty with implementation.
1. AI doesn’t solve that problem.
2. If it did, then the specification would be the code.
Diffs of pure code never really represented decisions and reasoning of humans very well in the first place. We always had human programmers who would check code in that just did stuff without really explaining what the code was supposed to do, what properties it was supposed to have, why the author chose to write it that way, etc.
AI doesn’t change that. It just introduces new systems which can, like humans, write unexplained, shitty code. Your review process is supposed to catch this. You just need more review now, compared to previously.
You capture decisions and specifications in the comments, test cases, documentation, etc. Yeah, it can be a bit messy because your specifications aren’t captured nice and neat as the only thing in your code base. But this is because that futuristic, Star Trek dream of just giving the computer broad, high-level directives is still a dream. The AI does not reliably reimplement specifications, so we check in the output.
The compiler does reliably reimplement functionally identical assembly, so that’s why we don’t check in the assembly output of compilers. Compilers are getting higher and higher level, and we’re getting a broader range of compiler tools to work with, but AI are just a different category of tool and we work with them differently.
>If it did, then the specification would be the code.
Except you can't run english on your computer. Also the specification can be spread out through various parts of the code base or internal wikis. The beauty of AI is that it is connected to all of this data so it can figure out what's the best way to currently implement something as opposed to regular code which requires constant maintenance to keep current.
At least for the purposes I need it for, I have found it reliable enough to generate correct code each time.
What do you mean? I can run English on my computer. There are multiple apps out there that will let me type "delete all files starting with" hacker"" into the terminal and end up with the correct end result.
And before you say "that's indirect!", it genuinely does not matter how indirect the execution is or how many "translation layers" there are. Python for example goes through at least 3 translation layers, raw .py -> Python bytecode -> bytecode interpreter -> machine code. Adding one more automated translation layer does not suddenly make it "not code."
I mean that the prompt is not like code. It's not a set of instructions that encodes what the computer will do. It includes instructions for how an AI can create the necessary code. Just because a specification is "translated" into code, that doesn't mean the input is necessarily code.
6 replies →
As long as your language is good enough to generate correct code at any point, it is a specification. If not, it is an ambiguous approximation.
You can't run most of what you would probably consider "code" on your computer either. C, Python, Rust, ... all have to be translated into something your computer can execute by compilers and interpreters.
On the other hand no current LLM can implement complex software from specification alone, especially not without iterating. Just today I realized how laughable far we are, after having fought GPT-5.1-Codex-Max for way longer than I should have over correctly implementing a 400 line python script for wrangling some git repositories. These things are infuriatingly bad as soon as you move away from things like web development.