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Comment by crvdgc | Hacker News Reader

I think the crux is that specification has been neglected since even before AI.

Stakeholders (client, managers) have been "vibe coding" all along. They send some vague descriptions and someone magically gives back a solution. Does the solution completely work? No one knows. It kinda works, but no one knows for sure.

Most of the time, it's actually the programmers' understanding of the domain that fills out the details (we all know what a correct form submission webpage looks like).

Now the other end has become AI, it remains to be seen whether this can be replicated.

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What they want: Computer: Make the room a wild west bar from 1900.

What they have: An undergraduate intern who is a former used car salesperson used to BSing their way through life.

They want the Holodeck, but not the post-scarcity society that makes it possible.

of course, because theres no money in it...

just look at software: cost of duplication is basically zero and here we are paying subscriptions (to huge profits) every month for it

switching to a true post-scarcity economy is gonna take more than just technology i think...

we all know what a correct form submission webpage looks like

millions of forms around the web would like to have a word… :)

We all know. But we all have a different vision of a ‘correct’ form

with all due respect but what does this mean? we can either "all know" or we can all not have a clue and have our own "visions" of the correct form, both of these are complete opposites.

decades of building garbage-barely-working forms is a proof that we just do not know (much like we (generally) don't know how to center a div on the page so once-per-year, without fail, top story on HN is "how to center a div" :) ).

We all think we know

This is spot-on, and a comment I wish I could pin for others to see.

GenAI is such a boon at present because it occasionally delivers acceptable mediocrity to PMs and Stakeholders who will accept said mediocrity because they have no real clue what they (or their customers) actually want. It’s a system of roles and output that delivers based on patterns in incomprehensively large data sets, provided to humans who cannot hope to validate that information is accurate or legitimate (and not just random patterns in a large enough data set), but passed along as gospel from digital machinegods. To a withering empire obsessed with nostalgia and whose institutions are crumbling beneath them, GenAI appears as a savior; to those confident in their position in the world order, it is merely a thin tool in a larger toolbox, to be used toward greater ends rather than middling output.

Those who understand the specification problems are in a position to capitalize off such monumental shifts, while those blindly chasing get-rich-quick schemes, grifts, and fads will be left behind.

Can you expand into the "those who understand the specification problems are in a position to capitalize off such shifts?"

Is this just business domain knowledge and good communication?

Always has been meme

> we all know what a correct form submission webpage looks like

Obviously we don‘t as phone numbers can be split in up to 4 fields with conflicting varieties of validation or just be one field.

Also the format varies depending on region and type of connection.

Or you are in Germany and phone number have variable length. They even have the word “number street” to mean “all phone numbers starting with 0123456” for example. It’s not a block, it’s a street, which can branch out in blocks of different lengths. Completely insane.

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