'A Sufficiently Detailed Spec Is Code' — Essay Challenges the Core Premise of AI Agentic Coding
Gabriel Gonzalez (Haskell For All) argues that the agentic coding promise — 'write specs, not code' — collapses under scrutiny: making a spec precise enough for reliable LLM code generation requires the same intellectual rigor as writing code itself, inevitably devolving into pseudocode, schemas, and literal algorithms. Testing OpenAI's Symphony spec approach, the author found that even prompting Claude with the published spec produced buggy, unreliable implementations; he invokes Dijkstra to argue that precision demands 'narrow interfaces' which is effectively code by another name. The post hit 118 upvotes on r/programming and directly counters the 'just write specs' narrative that has gained traction alongside OpenAI Symphony and similar agentic-spec frameworks this week.
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