alt Hacker NewsI'm still interested in your claim:
> If you instead spend a day writing a proper specification, then ask the agent to spend a week implementing that, you'll need zero tools and skills afterwards to clean it up, because there won't be any misunderstandings, assumptions or other things, just code fulfilling what the specification says.
Are you claiming that you reliably get good software out of agents using this process?
My experiential claim is that I've followed this process for complex pieces of software (and, often, taking significantly longer than a day -- more like several weeks, as if I was writing an academic paper) and they still get it wrong ... even with an "academic paper level spec"
Models: only the best, Fable 5 max, Sol 5.6 max, yada yada -- I'm not convinced this process works for "serious endeavors" (for instance: let's build a novel accelerator compiler or let's build a new incremental linker) where "serious" here means "something where I'll likely be spending multiple weeks working on it"
> Are you claiming that you reliably get good software out of agents using this process?
Yeah, for sure, I tend to be really strict about the overall design, keeping things minimal and only the abstractions needed, nothing more/less.
I don't know what "most complicated software" even is, I've only been writing software for 20 years or so, but mostly around startups, smaller companies and as a consultant/freelancer for companies of all sizes, so I won't even claim to know what "really complicated software" is. What I've done so far ranges from implementations of various ML models, native cross-platform applications, various types of games, simulation software and a bunch of tooling to help me with music production and VFX/animation/3D work.
Some of those I guess I wouldn't even have approached without LLMs, and probably would have taken me years if I did attempt, but following that process I basically end up with one spec, maybe 2K-3K lines in total, including step-by-step how things have to be implemented, then fire off Codex + GPT-5.3-Sol max with "/goal" saying exactly how things should be implemented, verified and so on, and update the specification file as it goes along, and not stop until everything from the specification been confirmed to be implemented correctly. Longest been 4-5 days until the goal is completed.
Always a lot of iterations afterwards of course, as I realize some things I put in the specification ultimately didn't made sense once it's implemented, so revise specification, figure out how to change, fire off "/goal", and repeat this until I have code that is better or at least equal to how I'd write it myself. It was a long time ago this process lead to something completely different being implemented, I usually get exactly what the specification says.