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by konovalov-nk 358 days ago
Nobody mentioned Joel Spolsky's October 2nd, 2000 article, so I'll start: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/10/02/painless-functiona...

Code is not a bottleneck. Specs are. How the software is supposed to work, down to minuscule detail. Not code, not unit tests, not integration tests. Just plain English, diagrams, user stories.

Bottleneck is designing those specs and then iterating them with end users, listening to feedback, then going back and figuring out if spec could be improved (or even should). Implementing actual improvements isn't hard once you have specs.

If specs are really good -- then any sufficiently good LLM/agent should be able to one-shot the solution, all the unit tests, and all the integration tests. If it's too large to one-shot -- product specs should never be a single markdown file. Think of it more like a wiki -- with links and references. And all you have to do is implement it feature by feature.
1 comments
intelVISA 358 days ago
> How the software is supposed to work, down to minuscule detail.

So... coding. :P

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konovalov-nk 357 days ago
Code is a technical specification and could be any programming language, markup, terraform files, configuration, whatever.

Product Spec is written in English and in a such way that everybody can understand it without technical knowledge. Because it doesn't operate in C arrays and nuances of how queues work -- just common sense and real-life objects/entities! Then the actual code is an abstraction that takes the spec and implements it for certain architecture / scalability requirements and so on.

For example you can ask to make to-do list app. You can build it on:

- As a CLI tool

- As a UI web interface

- As an AI agent that operates entirely on voice recognition and text-to-speech as interface

A product spec can omit this "tiny" detail, code -- cannot.

Even if you specify this is Web UI to-do app in product spec, there are still tons of things to choose for developer:

- Programming language

- Cloud/Self-hosted

- Architecture (monolith/microservices/modular monolith/SOA/event-driven)

You wouldn't specify in a Product spec that to-do items has to go to an SQS queue that lambda picks up and adds them to a DB, would you? That has to be a separate technical spec document, which is simply called documentation (+actual code in the repositories).

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