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This is gathering chatter so I need to clarify: neither openAI nor I is suggesting everyone prompts their own version. Obvs wasteful. Theres a canonical implementation! The important line is “in your programming language of choice”. Where lang could be any number of design prefs and variables.

IF you want to adapt software to fit your needs, run in your pref lang, change the architectural decisions, etc. rather than forking and editing source code, you can adjust at a higher level. Specs are a concise, directionally correct design ref with less complexity than the implementation code.

I like the idea conceptually, have you tried it in practice? I’m a bit concerned at how well a spec will actually be followed, especially as it increases in size and complexity.

Fred "the documentation is the spec" Brooks could get the test of all tests, seeing if System/360 can be generated from its docs. Also a test of the AI, I s'pose.

This is cool. I'm almost more interested in _how_ they wrote the spec. It obviously has a ton of planning and thought. I don't know how to do that. :)

It wouldn’t surprise me if it was extracted/distilled at the end of a much more exploratory/iterative process.

Agreed! Spec writing becomes the core process to build better tools for, skill-build around. Good product and design taste has always been the essence of great software, but now we get to put more energy and effort there.

I used to joke that Ada was not a programming language but a planning language because by the time you had specced everything out sufficiently there were no decisions left to make, you just followed the spec and a program magically happened at the end now everything is Ada