[prpl]

There is verification and validation.

The first part is making sure you built to your specification, the second thing is making sure you built specification was correct.

The second part is going to be the hard part for complex software and systems.

[josephg]

I think validation is already much easier using LLMs. Arguably this is one of the best use cases for coding LLMs right now: you can get claude to throw together a working demo of whatever wild idea you have without needing to write any code or write a spec. You don't even need to be a developer.

I don't know about you, but I'd much rather be shown a demo made by our end users (with claude) than get sent a 100 page spec. Especially since most specs - if you build to them - don't solve anyone's real problems.

Demo, don't memo.

[don_esteban]

Hm, how much real life experience do you have in delivering production SW systems?

Demo for the main flow is easy. The hard part is thinking through all the corner cases and their interactions, so your system robustly works in real world, interacting with the everyday chaos in a non-brittle fashion.

[bavell]

Hard disagree, clients/users often don't know what the best/right solution is, simply because they don't know what's possible or they haven't seen any prior art.

I'd much rather have a conversation with them to discuss their current problems and workflow, then offer my ideas and solutions.

[iwontberude]

I don’t think you are using validation in the same sense as PC

[baq]

> The second part is going to be the hard part for complex software and systems.

Not going to. Is. Actually, always has been; it isn’t that coding solutions wasn’t hard before, but verification and validation cannot be made arbitrarily cheap. This is the new moat - if your solutions require time consuming and expensive in dollar terms qa (in the widest sense), it becomes the single barrier to entry.

[avmich]

There was recent discussion about how making AI to write the validation for the code is a good approach. If you have formal proofs for your code, your QA needs go down.

[la64710]

Amazon Kiro starts with making the detailed specification based on human input in natural language.