this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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If only we had a way to communicate with machines in a reliable, deterministic and unambiguous way.
But natural language will let people without computer programming skills use their business domain knowledge to create compute programs
It's why COBOL is so popular.
Yeah you can write the code yourself. You can also write in c or even assembly if you really want to make it as unambiguous as possible, it'll just take more time. Some people like to code in Python though because they can write faster with it even if a lot of implementation details and choices are hidden from them because they don't care about those details.
Spec driven development in my view is just another step, albeit a big one, on the level of abstraction between assembly and python. Like python it has its places and has places where it should never be used for safety and performance reasons.
They may not care about the implementation details of a Python library, they do care about consistent execution and predictable results. And in some edge cases, they will care about the documentation saying exactly how those edge cases are handled.
Writing Python is abstraction, yes, but it's still programming. Once that Python code is written and tested and the dependencies are locked down, you can ship it and be certain it always works as designed.
Spec-driven code generation is nothing like that. I can't ship the specs. I could generate the code in a pipeline and ship that, maybe. But there's no way I'm getting consistent builds from a code generator. So what do people do? They generate the code and put it in source control for review. When have you ever checked-in a compiled executable or looked at it? There's machine code in there, shouldn't you review that the compiler did what you asked of it?
Consistency is dependent on the code base and not the "compiler" in this sense. If the code base has consistent patterns and only has one well documented way to implement something then the AI will follow those patterns, ie. If there is only one way to run a job, AI will use that method. There might be some variation in variable names, formatting, etc. but the core flow should be consistent between "runs"
You can and should still test your code , both manually and with automation to ensure it does what it says it does. Testing should be the way you are certain it always works as designed. IMO understanding your tests and test coverage is more important than understanding the implementation. This is why part of the spec for superpowers is a test plan, and that should be the most reviewed / iterated part.