[cardigan]

An upper bound to the amount of information you need to transmit to have something built the way you want it built is how much you need to tell a good developer about what you want made before it is made to a satisfactory degree.

And an upper bound to how long it can theoretically take to build something is the same as the time to transmit that information for a human plus some small epsilon: computers can run very fast.

So getting a computer to do what you want ideally should not be close to as slow and difficult as it is today. This is sort of the true goal, rather than formally specifying what you wish the computer would do. If you believe the goal is formally specifying what the computer does on top of bulletproof abstractions, we're already very far away from that - programmers today don't tell a CPU how to do branch prediction, or a compiler how to optimize their code, for instance.

Probably a really good system could do even better than the upper bound above - what if you knew what someone wanted before they could even describe it to you, and you built that for them?