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.)
I wrote something similar recently about how agent-generated code lacks the institutional memory that human-written code has. There's nobody to ask why a decision was made (1).
“Specsmaxxing” is basically the right response to this. When you can't rely on authorial memory, you have to put the intent somewhere durable. Specs become the source of truth by default if we continue down the road of AI generated code.
1: https://ossature.dev/blog/ai-generated-code-has-no-author/
I had a similar experience refactoring a large codebase• The only thing that made it possible was that each commit message had a JIRA ticket number tying it to a requirement or task. I could find the people behind the business logic and ask them about it.
> will always care what the spec says, and that’s never going to change
Did I miss something or is everyone back in 1970s, working in waterfall processes now?
We never left waterfall in the end. Working with and for dozens, collaborating with probably a hundred software companies in different scales, every single one said:
We do agile
Guess what? Every single one of them was doing waterfall.
Their agile included preplanning and pre-specifying the full spec and each task, before the project kicked off. We'd have meetings where we'd drill down into tasks, folks would write them down so detailed that there would be no other way than doing that. Agile would be claimed, but the start date, end date, end spec and number of developers was always concrete.
Sometimes, the end date was too late, so a panic would ensue. Most of the time, the date was too late because developers had "unknowns" which then had to be "drilled down and specced so they wouldnt be unknowns". Sometimes, nearly 50% of the workweek was spent on meetings.
A few times, a project was running late - so to make sure we are _really_ doing it agile, we'd have morning standups, evening standups, weekly plannings, retrospectives, and backlog refinement. It would waste the time, and the "unknowns" aka "tickets to refine" were again, as always, dependant upon the PM/PO/CEO's wishes, which wouldn't get crystallized until it was _really last minute_.
One customer wanted us to do a 2 year agile plan on building their product. We had gigantic calls with 20+ people in them, out of which at least half had some kind of "Agile SCRUM Level 3 Black belt Jirajitsu" certificates.
To them, Agile was just a thing you say before you plan things. Agile was just an excuse to deal with project being late by pinning it on Agile. Agile was just a cop out of "PM didn't know what to do here so he didnt write anything down". Agile was a "we are modern and cool" sticker for a company.
And unfortunately, to most of them, agile was just a thing you say for the job, as their minds worked in waterfall mode, their obligations worked in waterfall mode, companies worked in waterfall mode, and if they failed their obligation to the waterfall, their job would go down one.
So while we were doing the Agile ceremonies, prancing around with our Scrum master hats, using the right words to fit into the Agile™ worldview - we were doing waterfall all along.
And after 15 years, I'm not even sure - did agile really ever exist?
All through the agile era I wrote detailed specs for projects and then followed an agile process. The most successful parts of every project were the ones that we were able to spec best even when they diverged significantly from the original spec.
You don't plan to follow the plan. You plan in order to understand the whole problem space. Obviously no plan survives contact with reality.
Agree!
Another point of view is that LLM:s perform to an extent on the same level as outsourcing does. This interface requires a bit more contract mass than doing everything within single team.
Sort of, but the downside of waterfall was you build the wrong thing and waste a shitload of time rewriting it.
When rewriting the entire codebase is very quick and cheap, why bother iterating on small components?
> When rewriting the entire codebase is very quick and cheap, why bother iterating on small components?
We are nowhere near this scenario tbh. Token cost is very high and is currently heavily subsidized by VC money to gain market share. Also this realistically only applies to small projects, small codebases and mostly greenfield ones. No way you can rewrite the whole codebase quickly and cheaply in any mid-sized+ projects
But even assuming token cost plummets, any non-trivial piece of software that is valuable enough to generate income for the company is also big, complex, interconnected enough that cannot be rewritten quickly even by AI, also for business reasons too. If a piece of code works, is stable and is tested, then rewriting it will always bring a high degree of risk and uncertainty that in a lot of business critical applications is just not worth it. A stable system can stay untouched for years besides minor dependencies updates.
waterfall is not the sole purveyor of written docs
distributed teams do well when proposals, decision, etc, are written down, and can be easily found and referenced
it doesn't mean docs are frozen in time and can't be patched like code
I read that as "the business caring about what the spec says will never change" rather than "the spec will never change".
waterfall doesn’t mean writing down decisions
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What's the difference between this and Jira. Your specs already live somewhere, it's where you defined them. That's why it's nice to put the Jira ticket number in your code / commit, so you can refer back to the spec when something breaks
A specification isn't a series of change requests! Using Jira as your source of truth is no different to just recording all your prompts. There's nothing you can easily review to spot contradictions or how things interact with one another.
I've been doing "specmaxxing" for a few months now. Unlike the author I don't use Yaml, I use a mix of Markdown and Gherkin. If you haven't encountered Gherkin before, it's not new and you might know it under the name Cucumber or BDD.
Gherkin is basically a structured form of English that can be fed into a unit testing framework to match against methods.
The nice thing about writing acceptance criteria this way is that they become executable and analyzable. You write some Gherkin and then ask the model to make the tests execute and pass. Now in a good IDE (IntelliJ has good support) you can run the acceptance criteria to ensure they pass, navigate from any specific acceptance criteria to the code which tests it (and from there to the code that implements it), you can generate reports, integrate it into CI and so on.
And when writing out acceptance tests that are quite similar, the IDE will help you with features like auto-complete. But if you need something that isn't implemented in the test-side code yet, no big deal. Just write it anyway and the model will write the mapping code.
There's a variant of Gherkin specifically designed for writing UI tests for web apps that also looks quite interesting. And because it's an old ecosystem there's lots of tooling around it.
Another thing I've found works well is asking the models to review every spec simultaneously and find contradictions. I've built myself a tool that does this and highlights the problems as errors in IntelliJ, like compiler errors. So I can click a button in the toolbar and then navigate between paragraphs that contradict each other. It's like a word processor but for writing specs.
Once you're doing spec driven development, you don't need to write prompts anymore. Every prompt can just be "Update the code and tests to match the changes to the specs."
Jira is only a set of changes though. What happens on a long (10+ year) and complex (10+) developer project with many changes and revisions? Eventually you need an explicit specification that itself has a "current state", and a change log. Theoretically you could generate this from Jira, but in my experience it eventually became a mess on any larger project that didn't have explicit and maintained writen requirements.
What about when you migrate away from Jira, or when there’s a Cloudflare outage?
Nice! Your spec-maxxing is very resonant. I've been doing working with explicit requirements: elicit them from conversation with me or introspecting another piece of software; one-shot from them; and keep them up-to-date as I do the "old man shouts at Claude" iterations after whatever one-shotting came up with.
Unlike you, I wish for the LLM to do as much of the work as possible -- but "as possible" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I'm still trying to get clear on exactly where I am needed and where Opus and iterations will get there eventually.
It has really challenged me to get clearer on what a requirement is vs a constraint (e.g., "you don't get to reinvent the database schema, we're building part of a larger system"). And I still battle with when and how to specify UI behaviours: so much UI is implicit, and it seems quite daunting to have to specify so much to get it working. I have new respect for whoever wrote the undoubtedly bajillion tests for Flutter and other UI toolkits.
Forgot to add: I get several benefits from doing this.
1. Specifications that live outside the code. We have a lot of code for which "what should this do?" is a subjective answer, because "what was this written to do?" is either oral legend or lost in time. As future Claude sessions add new features, this is how Claude can remember what was intentional in the existing code and what were accidents of implementation. And they're useful for documenters, support, etc.
2. Specifications that stay up to date as code is written. No spec survives first contact with the enemy (implementation in the real world). "Huh, there are TWO statuses for Missing orders, but we wrote this assuming just one. How do we display them? Which are we setting or is it configurable?" etc. Implementer finds things the specifier got wrong about reality, things the specifier missed that need to be specified/decided, and testing finds what they both missed.
I have a colleague working on saving architecture decisions, and his description of it feels like a higher-abstraction version of my saving and maintaining requirements.
I do (1) the same but (2) differently. In my workflow, (2) are AI generated specs using human written (1) as the input. It's an intermediate stage between (1) and the codebase, allowing for a gradual token expansion from 30k to 250k to the final code which is 2-3M. The benefit I've found with this approach is it gives the AI a way to iterate on the details of whole system in one context window, whereas fitting the whole codebase into one prompt is impossible. The code is then nothing more than a style transfer from (2).
Let's cut through the noise - what did you build with this very elaborate process and how much ARR is it generating ?
Jfc
I actually read it all since it did not contain any hints of being AI generated (although I wouldn't be surprised to learn you did use AI to write it), so thank you for that. It's kind of crazy how I now have the default expectation that posts posted here are AI slop with little thought or care put in.
I am also stealing the idea of talking to LLMs as if it's an email. So funny, we need to be joymaxxing a bit more I think :)
Great idea -- just one suggestion if you want it to catch on: perform some IncelCultureMinning on the nomenclature.
You probably don't want people associating your work with abusing crystal meth and hitting yourself in the face with a hammer.
For anyone missing the reference, SNL has a pretty good explainer: