[adampunk]

>a plan detailed enough to reliably one-shot an implementation across several models.

What. Why should this be an output? Why if I make a project should I be responsible for also making this, an entirely different and much more difficult and potentially impossible project? If I come and show you a project that require required thousands of sessions to make I also have to show you how to one shot it in multiple models? Does that even make sense?

[jgraham]

To be clear: I don't think it will happen.

But the point of comparison is something like the HTML specification. That's supposed to be a document that is detailed enough about how to create an implementation that multiple different groups can produce compatible implementations without having any actual code in common.

In practice it still doesn't quite work: the specification has to be supplemented with testsuites that all implementations use, and even then there often needs to be a feedback loop where new implementations find new ambiguities or errors, and the specification needs to be updated. Plus implementors often "cheat" and examine each other's behaviour or even code, rather than just using the specification.

Nevertheless it's perhaps the closest thing I'm familiar with to an existing practice where the plan is considered canonical, and therefore worth thinking about as a model for what "code as implementation detail" would entail in other situations.

[adampunk]

I think the looping part is what stops this from being a practical solution. If we imagine that the actual code required some iteration in order to put down, I don’t know that we could say there is a one shot equivalent without testing that. Sometimes there may not even be an equivalent.

It’s possible that the solution to code being implementation detail is to be less precious about it and not more. I don’t really have an answer here and I don’t think anyone does because it’s all very new and it is hard to manage.

There’s also a pretty normal way in which this is going to diverge and perhaps already has. Developers are building local bespoke skills just like they used to develop and still do local bespoke code to make their work more efficient. They may be able to do something that you or I cannot using the same models—-there’s no way to homologize their output. It would be like asking someone to commit their dot files alongside the project output. Regardless of whether or not it was the right thing to do no one would do it.