[SirensOfTitan]

LLM-assisted development feels a lot like trend-driven development. When dealing with technique and heterogenous prompts and goals, it’s easy to gain somewhat of a gambler’s fallacy with respect to a particular technique.

Spec-driven development feels pretty questionable to me. I’m sure it works fine for feature work that is predictable or has been done before, but then I wonder why you’d waste your time with it.

Prior to LLMs, the whole vibe was to iterate rapidly toward a working thing so you can see what works and what doesn’t. Why would we abandon that strategy as an industry when the cost of writing code is ostensibly getting cheaper?

If I’m using LLMs at all, I’m using them to do a breadth search of prior art or ideas, then I’m doing what I might call a prototype onion: successive clean room attempts at a novel problem, accumulating what I learn at each attempt in each successive prompt. I usually then take the prototype and write the final version myself so I’m properly internalizing the idea.

Ultimately a lot of this prompt work feels like procrastination. It is not about understanding where these tools is useful and where they are not but trying to have them consume every aspect of the work.

[getnormality]

Or maybe people who like talking much more than they like code are now very excited about the possibility that talking has eaten software development.

This is exactly backwards. For many tasks, formal languages are better, more real, more beautiful than English. No matter how many millions of tokens you have, you will never talk the formulas of Fermat, Euler, and Gauss into irrelevance. And the same is true of good code.

Of course, a lot of code is ugly and utilitarian too, and maybe talking will make it less painful to write that stuff.

[skydhash]

> a lot of code is ugly and utilitarian too,

And as everyone who can abstract well knows: Ugly code that have staying power have a reason to be ugly. And the best will be annotated with HACK and NOTE comments. Anything else can be refactored and abstracted to a much better form. But that requires a sense of craftsmanship (to know better) and a time allowance for such activity.

[orphea]

  > Or maybe people who like talking much more than they like code are now very excited about the possibility that talking has eaten software development.

This has been my experience. In my team, the most excited people appear to be those who spend most of their time in meetings.

[stingraycharles]

People forget that the code is the spec. Usually it’s more effective to maintain comments.

Heck, given that LLMs are language driven, why not bring literate programming back? Knuth would be proud.