alt Hacker NewsI think there is one problem with defining acceptance criteria first: sometimes you don't know ahead of time what those criteria are. You need to poke around first to figure out what's possible and what matters. And sometimes the criteria are subjective, abstract, and cannot be formally specified.
Of course, this problem is more general than just improving the output of LLM coding tools
Yeah it’s extremely helpful to clarify your thoughts before starting work with LLM agents.
I find Claude Code style plan mode to be a bit restrictive for me personally, but I’ve found that creating a plan doc and then collaboratively iterating on it with an LLM to be helpful here.
I don’t really find it much different than the scoping I’d need to do before handing off some work to a more junior engineer.