I mostly agree, but why stop at tests? Shouldn’t it be spec driven development? Then neither the code or the language matter. Wouldn’t user stories and requirements à la bdd (see cucumber) be the right abstraction?
Natural language is too ambiguous for this, which makes it impossible to automatically verify
What you need is indeed spec-driven development, but specs need to be written in some kind of language that allows for more formal verification. Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract, basically.
It is extremely ironic that, instead, the two languages that LLMs are the most proficient in - and thus the ones most heavily used for AI coding - are JavaScript and Python...
I don't think you're wrong but I feel like there's a big bridge between the spec and the code. I think the tests are the part that will be able to give the AI enough context to "get it right" quicker.
It's sort of like a director telling an AI the high level plot of a movie, vs giving an AI the actual storyboards. The storyboards will better capture the vision of the director vs just a high level plot description, in my opinion.
What you need is indeed spec-driven development, but specs need to be written in some kind of language that allows for more formal verification. Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract, basically.
It is extremely ironic that, instead, the two languages that LLMs are the most proficient in - and thus the ones most heavily used for AI coding - are JavaScript and Python...