For anything large, the spec becomes increasingly more complicated. Look at software schedules in the old waterfall days of the 80s/90s: the spec / planning period was maybe 30-70% of the project.
Unless you’re working on pretty routine stuff, the real problem is that the customer (which might be you) almost never knows what they want. The spec will change the minute a customer gets something to play with.
This was the real value of agile in my mind: letting a customer change their mind as early as possible.
Very few devs are actually reviewing any generated code.
> Why not fast forward to that point and save 80% of the time
If you are saving 80% of time, you aren't actually reviewing the code.
For the literal code:
• A healthy cocktail of /WX + /Wall, plus clang-tidy with very few suppressions
• An extremely opinionated mix of clang-format and LLM-generated bespoke formatting that AST-based tools cant express
• Hungarian notation; all stack locals pre-hoisted, declared in order of appearance, and separated from subsequent assignments
• Enforced dataflow: all memory accesses are bounded independent of branch resolution, with only data-oblivious indexing
• Functions have a single point of return
In a C89 workflow, this pushes agents to produce code where wrong business/domain decisions are unmistakably obvious, while eliminating the vast majority of bug classes before I ever read it.
So yeah, Ill reassert 80%, if not more.
Just because very few devs are qualified at doing their fucking job, it doesn't make someone trying to use AI properly wrong.
> If you are saving 80% of time, you aren't actually reviewing the code.
The idea is that if you spend time in specification ahead of time, reviewing and validating will be easier and less time consuming later.
I haven't tried it myself, but the idea rings true to me.
Hell, you probably couldn't even build a simple bike shed from plans without having to revise them while building, so I am skeptical that without writing you are going to pinpoint the problems in the spec.
Reading only gets you a short way towards learning.
Neither have I. This does not make the spec useless. I don't spec hoping that it will be the source of truth, I spec because planning more often than not allows me to spot inconsistencies and ambiguity ahead of time, not halfway through implementation.
> Hell, you probably couldn't even build a simple bike shed from plans without having to revise them while building, so I am skeptical that without writing you are going to pinpoint the problems in the spec.
I think you are using specification and design wrong.
It's not supposed to be a bible that implementation can't deviate from. It's a plan, not law. It's okay for the plan to be adjusted in contact with reality.
It's still useful to know ahead of time constraints, expected output, assumptions, premises, etc.
My point is that without writing, you can't surface the type of problems you usually surface. The AI isn't going to surface those problems for you.
It's rare when reviewing that you think "Oh shit, this approach is totally wrong, we need to throw it away", while it's common when writing code to have that reaction.
If you aren't writing, you aren't having that reaction, and you aren't going to get it from reviewing code that has thousands of green "passed" lines in the testsuite.
That's not my experience. It is actually very common for specifications and design to be reviewed and improved.
I think there may be crossed wires here - specs and designs are reviewed, but I've never seen a code review result in a spec+design review, while I always see spec+desiogn review happen during the "writing code" phase.
In short, reading code does not result in a spec+design review, writing code does. If you are not writing code and only reading it is unlikely you will trigger a spec+design review.
is it possible that you might be in a job that’s not right for you?
it sounds like you want to cut out 80% of your job. if you want to cut out 80% of your job, maybe you’re doing the wrong job? y’know?
like, i read this comment and my mind goes to project/product manager who has real experience of coding. going from a spec (tickets / design docs / customer feedback notes / epics / stories / whatever) to a working implementation (team of engineers build it and you don’t have to use brain power). it sounds like you’re describing turning your job into the job of a PM.
we need more PMs like that in the industry. good PMs are few and far between, good PMs who know what’s it’s like to code — even fewer. so maybe have a think about why you’re working this way? i don’t really care if you do or don’t, but future you might be glad if you took some to think about it.
So, I "doodle" some text / ideas / planning with a calligraphy pen, and type in some code, occasionally, both mainly for the fun aspects. There are side benefits to both, too. Writing some plans slowly and "beautifully" drags them out and I get to think longer on them, so the sporadic "nice looking plans" are often more well thought. And doing the coding all by myself stops my brain from losing the ability. I was initially in the 100% AI-writes-all-code camp for a while and noticed I am getting notably slow in some personal coding skills. It is too early to treat specs as the new code and old languages as assembly (but I admit we might get there some day).
In other words, I think AI doing 90-99% of the coding, depending on the language verbosity and AI accuracy for the code at hand, is quite reasonable.
Professionally, I'm employed writing safety-critical avionics software. Superfluous amounts of cogent tooling putting guardrails on agents has enabled me to spend heaps more time to think deeply about how the software should work at a systemic level. The code by definition must be heavily criticized and battle-tested before it can go out the door to begin with. Albeit a beautiful part of coding, those sporadic bursts of creativity drive the code leaving my desk less and less, and I feel strongly that has made its quality paradoxically better since I'd spent much more time on broader implications and interactions.