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Comment by Twey | Hacker News Reader

The traditional name for this spec is ‘source code’ — a canonical source of truth for the behaviour of a system that is as human-readable as we know how to make it, that will be processed by automated tools into a less-readable derived artefact for a computer to execute.

Checking the compiled artefact into the codebase without checking in its source code has always been a risky move!

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A specification, whether formal or less formal, is very different from the source code.

But it is also always less specific than source code, even if the attempt is to dictate the latter as close as possible.

I agree with you, I think the replies are misunderstanding the basis for code and specs and making semantic distinctions. Code is specs, just in a different syntax for machines to understand. This is a pillar of the discipline of the discipline of requirement specifications that Uncle Bob talks about in Clean Agile.

Technology evolves and traditions change. What persists is the role, not the filename and its extension. Weddings are still weddings even after things went from painted portraits to film cameras to camcorders to smartphones to livestreams. Same with birthdays. Cards became phone calls, Facebook wall posts, group chats, shared albums, or generated videos (Sora, RIP).

The tradition of having a deck of punch cards evolved to having assembly, to Pascal, Fortran, C, basic. The important part is a human-auditable directive, not an opaque, generated artifact as the thing that matters.

have evolved and adapted. Photography, film cameras, polaroids, camcorders, digital cameras, smartphones, social media, Zoom/virtual attendees. Same with birthdays. Handwritten cards, to phone calls to e-cards, Facebook wall posts, video calls, shared photo albums and Sora (RIP) videos.

> The important part is a human-auditable directive, not an opaque, generated artifact as the thing that matters.

Your arguments create a false dichotomy. You look at it from consumer perspective, while coding and it's artifacts are usually done by suppliers. If you change camcorder to tv advertisement, the requirements shift. The human auditable directive and the outcome matter. Coca Cola probably has very high standards for their IP (the directive) and doesn't care about the outcome (AI slop ads). The result is disgruntled consumers.

If you don't care about the "opaque" generated artifact, then you are Coca Cola.

As far as I understand it I'm on your side in this argument — I think ‘code’ continues to matter so long as the LLM-to-execution pipeline remains a leaky abstraction — but I don't think the analogy is correct. The ads are the resultant behaviour of the software, e.g. the UX, not the code.

>The traditional name for this spec is ‘source code’

Specs are the end goal, not how the software look at a moment in time.

Specs also evolve over time. There's no ‘end goal’ because requirements are always changing.

Specs are traditionally more forward-looking only because, by removing a lot of the implementation details that are required to write code, the specification can be written to be much broader in scope than code in an equivalent time period. But periodically we invent software that lets us automatically fill in more details of the software that now don't need to be specified by humans, and a level of specification that was previously ‘spec’ turns into ‘code’.

spec isn't code. There's a C language specification and many implementations. There are a handful of browsers each implementing HTML, JS, and CSS specs in their own way.

And given a C description of a program, a C runtime can implement that program in various different ways — interpreted vs compiled, explicit memory management vs garbage collection, different pointer sizes and memory layouts, parallelism at various points or not. It's turtles all the way down :) It just becomes ‘code’ at the point where a computer can execute it (in one way or another) without further human intervention.

The source code is not the specification, the source code is an implementation of the specification. The specification tells you what happens, the source code tells you how it happens. Ideally you also have some additional documentation for the why.

As any four-year-old can tell you, ‘why’ is infinitely recursive. ‘What’ from the perspective of level n is ‘how’ looking down from level n+1 and ‘why’ looking up from level n-k.

That usually does not matter in practice because you quickly reach a level of sufficient understanding.

We usually use UUIDs for this type of object but we have to send those objects to the legacy system XYZ, which only supports IDs with up to sixteen characters and is case insensitive, so we generate sixteen character random alphanumeric strings with uppercase letters which provides 82 bits of entropy.

Could you go deeper? Sure. Why do we have to send those objects to XYZ? Why does the legacy system still exist? Why does it not support UUIDs? Why is there no secondary key specifically for that system? Why are we using UUIDs?

But most likely you do not have to spell all those out. The point of a why is to explain why something is not what one would expect, you explain on top of some common knowledge. Everyone involved might know what XYZ does and why some objects have to get send there. If not, that is probably written down elsewhere. Why is the system using UUIDs? Maybe written down in the design for the persistence layer.

Sure, I'm not suggesting we need to go into infinite regress for every explanation! I'm saying that you should bear in mind that you _are_ in the middle of an infinite stack, and what is a ‘how’, a ‘what’ or a ‘why’ is just a function of your current position in it relative to the thing you're talking about. In the ID generation code you might want to explain why you're using this weird format here instead of a more standard format (because it needs to be passed to legacy system XYZ). But if you go up a step or two to where the ID is passed to XYZ in code, that ‘why’ has become a ‘what’ — the calling code acts as a ‘specification’ for the behaviour of that ID generation code.

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