Comment by carlmr
19 days ago
>but the code to me is a forcing mechanism into ironing out the details, and I don't get that when I'm writing a specification.
This is so on point. The spec as code people try again and again. But reality always punches holes in their spec.
A spec that wasn't exercised in code, is like a drawing of a car, no matter how detailed that drawing is, you can't drive it, and it hides 90% of the complexity.
To me the value of LLMs is not so much in the code they write. They're usually to verbose, start building weird things when you don't constantly micromanage them.
But you can ask very broad questions, iteratively refine the answer, critique what you don't like. They're good as a sounding board.
I love using LLMs as well as rubber ducks - what does this piece of code do? How would you do X with Y? etc.
The problem is that this spec-driven philosophy (or hype, or mirage...) would lead to code being entirely deprecated, at least according to its proponents. They say that using LLMs as advisors is already outdated, we should be doing fully agentic coding and just nudge the LLM etc. since we're losing out on 'productivity'.
>They say that using LLMs as advisors is already outdated, we should be doing fully agentic coding and just nudge the LLM etc. since we're losing out on 'productivity'.
As long as "they" are people that either profit from FOMO or bad developers that still don't produce better software than before, I'm ok ignoring the noise.