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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

This is why every one of my coding agent sessions starts with "... write a detailed spec in spec.md and wait for me to approve it". Then I review the spec, then I tell it "implement with red/green TDD".

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The premise was that the AI solution would replace the engineering team, so who exactly is writing/reviewing this detailed spec?

That's a bad premise.

Maybe, but you're responding to a thread about why AI might or might not be able to replace an entire engineering team:

> Ultimately I think over the next two years or so, Anthropic and OpenAI will evolve their product from "coding assistant" to "engineering team replacement", which will include standard tools and frameworks that they each specialize in (vendor lock in, perhaps), but also ways to plug in other tech as well.

This is the context of how this thread started, and this is the context in which DrammBA was saying that the spec problem is very hard to fix [without an engineering team].

Might be good to define the (legacy) engineering team. Instead of thinking 0/1 (ugh, almost nothing happens this way), the traditional engineering team may be replaced by something different. A team mostly of product, spec writers, and testers. IDK.

The job of AI is to do what we tell it to do. It can't "create a spec" on its own. If it did and then implemented that spec, it wouldn't accomplish what we want it to accomplish. Therefore we the humans must come up with that spec. And when you talk about a software application, the totality of its spec written out, can be very complex, very complicated. To write and understand, and evolve and fix such a spec takes engineers, or what used to be called "system analysts".

To repeat: To specify what a "system" we want to create does is a highly complicated task, which can only be dones by human engineers who understand the requirements for the system, and how parts of those requirements/specs interact with other parts of the spec, what are the consequences of one (part of the) spec to other parts of it. We must not writ e"impossible specs" like draw me a round square. Maybe the AI can check whether the spec is impossible or not, but I'm not so sure of that.

So I expect that software engineers will still be in high demand, but they will be much more productive with AI than without it. This means there will be much more software because it will be cheaper to produce. And the quality of the software will be higher in terms of doing what humans need it to do. Usability. Correctness. Evolvability. In a sense the natural language-spec we give the AI is really something written in a very high-level programming-language - the language of engineers.

BTW. As I write this I realize there is no spell-checker integrated into Hacker News. (Or is there?). Why? Because it takes developers to specify and implement such a system - which must be integrated into the current HN implementation. If AI can do that for HN, it can be done, because it will be cheap enough to do it -- if HN can exactly spell out what kind of system it wants. So we do need more software, better software, cheaper software, and AI will helps us do that.

A 2nd factor is that we don't really know if a spec is "correct" until we test the implemented system with real users. At that point we typically find many problems with the spec. So somebody must fix the problems with the spec, evolve the spec and rinse and repeat the testing with real users -- the developers who understand the current spec and why it is is not good enough.

AI can write my personal scripts for me surely. But writing a spec for a system to be used by thousands of humans, still takes a lot of (human) work. The spec must work for ALL users. That makes it complicated and difficult to get right.

Well, perhaps it'll only shrink the engineering team by 95% then.

Why would you shrink the team rather than become 20x more productive as a whole?

Either way can work. It depends on what the rest of the business needs.

Users don't want changes that rapidly. There's not enough people on the product team to design 20x more features. 20x more features means 400x more cross-team coordination. There's only positive marginal ROI for maybe 1.5-2x even if development is very cheap.

The premise is in progress. We are only at the beginning of the fourth year of this hype-phase, and we haven't even reached AGI yet. It's obviously not perfect, maybe never will, but we are not a the point yet were we can conclude which future is true. The singularity hasn't happend yet, so we are still moving with (llm-enhanced) human speed at the moment, meaning things need time.

Same, and similarly something like a "create a holistic design with all existing functionality you see in tests and docs plus new feature X, from scratch", then "compare that to the existing implementation and identify opportunities for improvement, ranked by impact, and a plan to implement them" when the code starts getting too branchy. (aka "first make the change easy, then make the easy change"). Just prompting "clean this code up" rarely gets beyond dumb mechanical changes.

Given so much of the work of managing these systems has become so rote now, my only conclusion is that all that's left (before getting to 95+% engineer replacement) is an "agent engineering" problem, not an AI research problem.

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