Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML

brendanmc6

Author here, if you don't want to read all that, I'll post one excerpt that I think sums it up nicely: > My point is, the spec must live somewhere, even if you don’t write it down. The spec is what you want the software to be. It often exists only in your head or in conversations. You and your team and your business will always care what the spec says, and that’s never going to change. So you’re better off writing it down now! And I think that a plain old list of acceptance criteria is a good place to start. (That’s really all that `feature.yaml` is.)

up-n-atom

the token usage isn’t sustainable. formal english is a barrier but requirement for specification. brevity is the language of money and that’s the premise of management using ai. fyi language alone can’t define/describe requirements which is why UML existed.

wismwasm

Try openspec: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/blob/main/docs/gettin...

wesselbindt

I'm still confused as to why folks don't just write executable specs.

arikrahman

I use OpenSpec for my spec management, and I scrolled down to the comparison. The gripe seems to be with a semantic difference. Specs describing a current system is the basis for AS/IS Gap Analysis. Also, I mainly pursue these tools so that I can have AI accelerate this process and broker an agreement after negotiating specs with the agent.

colinmarc

Wow - I love programming in YAML! You know what would make this really fun? Sprinkle in some Jinja. Then we'll be cooking with gas.

augment_me

Completely subjective take, but I feel like 95% of these "tools" that are prompt-engineering inventions created by the authors with their bias and to suit their needs don't have anything supporting them besides the authors' subjective experience. I have seen the same idea with processes, pipelines, lists, bullet points, jsons, yamls, trees, prioritization queues all for LLM context and instruction alignment. It's like the authors take the structure they are familiar with, and go 100% in on it until it provides value for them and then they think it's the best thing since sliced bread. I would like, for once, to see some kind of exploration/abalation against other methods. Or even better, a tool that uses your data to figure out your personal bias and structure preference for writing specs, so that you can have a way of providing yourself value.

photios

Yesterday I heard about lat.md [1] which seems to have similar ideas about annotating code with spec refs. I now need to try them both. [1] https://www.lat.md/

jwpapi

And once you’ve written all these specs you realize it became so slow that it’s faster to do it yourself in editor

ltbarcly3

Grindmaxxing, a long form blog post that is actually just an advertisement for his website.

zarzavat

YAML is one of the worst technologies ever invented, it has more warts than features. One of the benefits of LLMs is that they can write YAML for me, wherever I am forced to use it. Otherwise, I like the idea of machine-readable specs.

jFriedensreich

Where is the part where the author overcomes ai psychosis? Reads like digging in deeper and deeper.

mrbnprck

Could it be that slop PRs are less frequently rejected/commented due to (unfortunate) increased acceptance of it? As it turns out when maxxing AI on leaf parts of a program, the quality of the code doesn't matter that much anymore when compared to building the fundament.

hansmayer

> We are entering the post-slop era. My software is more robust, better tested, better integrated, and more observable than ever before. And my velocity keeps increasing! Don't we just love the hard fact conclusions based on sample size N=1 and hand-waving arguments?

imiric

I'm tired, boss. This industry has become a parody of itself, and people are celebrating.

jeffreygoesto

Old ist new I guess. This is independent of whether A"I" or a human executes, the point is that you need this if specifying and execution lie apart, be it in time or space. This is basically the whole point of the V-Model and processes (if used correctly as a tool and not preferred as goals) and was already researched an formalized in the 60s and 70s.

wiseowise

What is it with people and procrastinating with the most useless shit you can imagine? First it was choice of editor: people were micro optimizing every aspect of their typing experience, editor wars where people would literally slaughter over suggesting another camp. Editor wars v2: IDEs arrived and second editor war began. Revenge of the note taking apps: Obsidian/Roam/Joplin/Apple Notes/Logseq. Just one plugin, just one more knowledge graph, bro, and I’ll have peak productivity. 10x is almost here. AI: you’re witnessing it now. Do people NOT have anything else in life? How are y’all finding time to do all of this shit? Are you doing it on company time? Do you have hobbies, do you learn foreign languages, travel, have kids or spouses, drive a car, other thousand “normie” things outside of staring at the freaking monitor or thinking about this shit 24/7? Did I miss the invention of a Time Machine?

taffydavid

I just spent a week training up in spec driven development through bmad, which was awful, and speckit which was ok but not great. Both had what seemed like unnecessary ceremony around the specs, generating fields of spec documents which presumably fill up the context window quickly. I just kept thinking "this should be using something simpler, all this markdown is unnecessary" This seems like the answer to that thought!

stevefan1999

So...is this just Cucumber cough cough behavior driven design again, but stored in YAML so that LLMs can read it easier by loading the AST instead of tokenizing the text?

TheServitor

ugh with the "maxxing" everything