[pipes]

On the using AI assistants I find that everything is moving so fast that I feel constantly like "I'm doing this wrong". Is the answer simply "dedicate time to experimenting? I keep hearing "spec driven design" or "Ralph" maybe I should learn those? Genuine thoughts and questions btw.

[gnatolf]

More specifically regarding spec-driven development:

There's a good reason that most successful examples of those tools like openspec are to-do apps etc. As soon as the project grows to 'relevant' size of complexity, maintaining specs is just as hard as whatever other methodology offers. Also from my brief attempts - similar to human based coding, we actually do quite well with incomplete specs. So do agents, but they'll shrug at all the implicit things much more than humans do. So you'll see more flip-flopped things you did not specify, and if you nail everything down hard, the specs get unwieldy - large and overly detailed.

[zozbot234]

> if you nail everything down hard, the specs get unwieldy - large and overly detailed

That's a rather short-sighted way of putting it. There's no way that the spec is anywhere as unwieldly as the actual code, and the more details, the better. If it gets too large, work on splitting a self-contained subset of it to a separate document.

[lelanthran]

> There's no way that the spec is anywhere as unwieldly as the actual code, and the more details, the better.

I disagree - the spec is more unwieldy, simply by the fact of using ambiguous language without even the benefit of a type checker or compiler to verify that the language has no ambiguities.

[skydhash]

People are keen to forget that programming languages are specs. And a good technique for coding is to build up you own set of symbols (variables, struct, and functions) so that the spec become easier to write and edit. Writing spec with natural language is playing russian roulette with the goals of the system, using AI as the gun.

[gnatolf]

Everybody feels like this, and I think nobody stays ahead of the curve for a prolonged time. There's just too many wrinkles.

But also, you don't have to upgrade every iteration. I think it's absolutely worthwhile to step off the hamster wheel every now and then, just work with you head down for a while and come back after a few weeks. One notices that even though the world didn't stop spinning, you didn't get the whiplash of every rotation.

[Our_Benefactors]

I don’t think Ralph is worthwhile, at least the few times I’ve tried to set it up I spent more time fighting to get the configuration right than if I had simply run the prompt. Coworkers had similar experiences, it’s better to set a good allowlist for Claude.

[bobthepanda]

I think find what works for you, and everything else is kind of noise.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice.

——

Ive also found that picking something and learning about it helps me with mental models for picking up other paradigms later, similar to how learning Java doesn’t actually prevent you from say picking up Python or Javascript