[martythemaniak]

There's a lot of people wondering "Why not just do this all in code", to which there is a very simple and straightforward answer: compression.

An LLM/agent can take 100 tokens worth of spec and turn it into 1000 tokens worth of code. We all understand this well enough in the most basic case: you type a one line comment and the LLM will give you the correct 10 line function. But this scales - 10 line comment into 100 line function, 100 line spec into a 1000 line object etc. Depending on the work, you could get more or less than 10x compression. The disagreements are all largely "what what level of resolution should devs be operating", my opinion is that the current sweet spot it roughly 1000 tokens of spec (~750 word doc/3 pages) producing 10000 tokens (~1000loc)

This compression allows your spec to be much denser and more readable than raw code. It can be shared, understood and modified by non-dev partners more easily, gives you flexibility into how it's implemented etc.