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Comment by jweir | Hacker News Reader

Remember having to write detailed specs before coding? Then folks realized it was faster and easier to skip the specs and write the code? So now are we back to where we were?

One of the problems with writing detailed specs is it means you understand the problem, but often the problem is not understand - but you learn to understand it through coding and testing.

So where are we now?

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Skip specs, and you often ended up writing the wrong program - at substantial cost.

The main difference now is the parrots have reduced the cost of the wrong program to near zero, thereby eliminating much of the perceived value if a spec.

Astronaut 1, AI-assisted developers: You mean, it's critical to plan and spec out what you want to write before you start in on code?

Astronaut 2, Tim Bryce: Always has been...

We’re not „thinking with portals” about these things enough yet. Typically we’d want a detailed spec beforehand, as coding is expensive and time consuming, thus we want to make sure we’re coding the right thing. With AI though, coding is cheap. So let AI skip the spec and write the code badly. Then have it review the solution, build understanding, design a spec for better solution and have it write it again. Rinse and repeat as many times you need.

It’s also nothing new, as it’s basically Joe Armstrong's programming method. It’s just not prohibitively expensive for the first time in history.

Joe should sue.

That’d be challenging for him right now.

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