Comment by cadamsdotcom

Headline true, article false.

AI exists at the boundary of codification. When you understand something well enough to express it in a deterministic way, it is no longer worthwhile to keep asking AI for that thing over and over - you should codify it.

But wait, I hear you say? AI has knowledge! And we can rely on that knowledge and sprinkle on top some brief instructions and it'll get things right and work out the details itself!

That is spec driven development.

And this is great one single time. Except, knowledge shifts. You are outsourcing part of what you've codified to society as a whole, in the form of language model knowledge. You're also trusting current and future models to always produce something that meets the requirements, and never be quantized under you, and produce the same result next time despite being a probabilistic system with no memory, and and and.

Better to freeze everything in place in your codebase so you get predictable results - in other words, codify it! Let's store the desired state of that button in code in a very complicated thing that's existed for decades called a string, so it always says "Finish" and never says "Done" - even if we regenerate the app.

That's pretty unexciting and doesn't justify tens of billions of investment. Which means you won't hear it from anyone with tokens to sell. But it's what you have to do to make something people want.