I almost never use AI to write my words. And when I do, it’s heavily hand edited. Every single word of my above comment was hand written. No AI was used to summarize or reply to your post. I did use fair fewer profanities than my usual style (which helps a reader hear the human behind the words) because I didn’t want to come across as aggressive or insulting, especially with English not being your first language, I erred on the side of caution.

This is where the open spec tries to help/solve. But this is a bandaid. Without a lot of hand-holding the models will make shity decisions/code. And this is cumulative, the more you try to steer the wheel, the worse it gets. I can specify details, but a 3 years old project is in this shape, and no amount of LLM will solve/help.

I’m interested in open spec since reading your article. I wasn’t aware before. It might be helpful to my efforts. In all cases when we run into a decision point or problem, we update the documentation first, and then implement.

To be honest, with a large enough project a decision will take longer, if not impossible in a LLM driven codebase. It will be years to debugging, breaking down and rebuilding to even get close.

It depends what you think is large enough. I work in microservices where the effort is far beyond simple Python scripts at which LLMs excel, but not at the level of a full product. Our process is not nearly so messy. But it does require a lot of up front work, and a lot of intermediary steps to make sure that every problem, every judgment call however big or small is formally documented into the spec.

Wrong, from the experiments on the academia, we get the fact that engineers with AI are often slower, because the problem was never in the code

I challenge this notion. I have real, measurable productivity gains of 20-30% which is double what I expected. I believe the key factors are experienced developers and critical thinking, but I’m aware of that research and it doesn’t align with my experience, so there is some difference at play. I’ve seen many examples of it going wrong, but with caution and skepticism, we are finding success that defies that research.

But I think you missed my larger point, which was that the developers grow and become more capable in general, where even with our system, the AI can only grow more capable within one particular project and you’re largely starting from scratch on the next.

I try to keep around 1.5k to 2k words a week. It’s not always the case, some weeks I’m somewhat more inspired, sometimes I need some refinement, but this is a personal view, I want the reader to have a “conversation” with the author. This is the type of metaphor I try to use.

I applaude your commitment. I can’t do that. I’m always afraid I won’t have anything worth saying on a regular schedule. That said, the current document is not a conversation but a lecture. Splitting it up allows a reader to say, “interesting, tell me more about this.”

Again, all human words. No ai involved. Probably you’ll find some typos if you look. No matter how hard I edit, I always do. Good luck. Hope to read more from you.