You end up with a nice spec that you wouldn’t have had otherwise? That has value even if you discard all the LLM-generated code.
I think experienced engineers are able to go straight from a vague requirement to an implementation without that intermediate step, and that power is easy to abuse. We build an implicit spec on our head, which gets translated to code on the fly, and then gets forgotten.
Not defending the LLM technology, but i do think this is one of the upside.
Specs are great for short term discussions about requisites and implementation.
But there’s this old adage, “Confluence is where knowledge goes to die”. I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a company where this wasn’t true.
If you write a spec, there’s a non zero chance that nobody will update it in a year, because it has no effect to the bottom line, and engineers have to be willing to look them up every time they make changes to code, which is never the case.
You end up with a nice spec that you wouldn’t have had otherwise? That has value even if you discard all the LLM-generated code.
I think experienced engineers are able to go straight from a vague requirement to an implementation without that intermediate step, and that power is easy to abuse. We build an implicit spec on our head, which gets translated to code on the fly, and then gets forgotten.
Not defending the LLM technology, but i do think this is one of the upside.
Specs are great for short term discussions about requisites and implementation.
But there’s this old adage, “Confluence is where knowledge goes to die”. I don’t think I’ve ever worked at a company where this wasn’t true.
If you write a spec, there’s a non zero chance that nobody will update it in a year, because it has no effect to the bottom line, and engineers have to be willing to look them up every time they make changes to code, which is never the case.