Another interesting talk about specs, by Sean Grove.

On YT as The New Code ~21mins

My notes:

The value of code and why specifications might be a better approach. Communicate intent to other humans.

Code is only 10-20% of impact; the rest is structured communications.

  • talk, understand, distill, ideate, plan, share, translate, test, verify

Most of what one does is structured communication; you output code. But you don’t actually care about the code. You care about the results.

Structured communications are the bottleneck. More AI = more bottleneck.

Near future: effective communication = programming.

Vibe coding: mostly communication! But we throw the prompts away.

Capture your intentions and values in a specification. Written spec aligns humans. No spec == vague idea.

In a spec… Examples = tests Give each example an id and require that to be copied into the code.

(specs for model alignment) (the U. S. Constitution is a spec)

“Engineering is the precise exploration (by humans) of software solutions to human problems.” “We are moving away from machine encodings to a human encoding.”