alt Hacker News> Good specs should be grounded (complete and not ambiguous), they don't need to be formal
IMHO, this is a mistake. I guess we play with it because there’s isn’t anything better nowadays. Writing and maintaining “specs” in plain english is painful.
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crazygringo • yesterday at 11:53 PM
> Writing and maintaining “specs” in plain english is painful.
The subject of this entire post is development with agents. Writing specs in English is how you do that. If you don't like it, then this is probably not the right article for you to be commenting on.
Natural language is incredibly expressive and fairly easy to read and write. Pick your favorite formal specification language...and you can just express some properties in them, and they are mostly niche at that. If you increase the expressiveness of your formal language too much, it just becomes code, then you are back to square one. LLMs are also incredibly proficient in processing natural language; i.e. writing, maintaining, and using a spec written in plain english is actually fairly viable with a modern LLM.