Spec Kit
An interesting tool:
The New Code — Sean Grove, OpenAI
The new scarce skill is writing specs that fully capture intent and values.
Whoever master that becomes the most valuable programmer.
Specs let you ship faster and safer. Everyone can contribute now. Whoever writes the spec - PM, lawmaker, engineer, marketer - is the programmer.
Is you job to write code?
Engineering has never been writing code.
Coding is an incredible skill and asset. Bit it’s not the end goal.
Engineering is the precise exploration (by humans) of software solutions to human problems.
We’re just moving away from disparate machine encodings to a unified (human) encoding.
Put it in action
- Start a spec for every AI feature
- Debate clauses, attach examples
- Make the spec executable
- Feed the spec to the model
- Test against the spec
An example of the OpenAI model spec:
Written in Markdown, of course.
Close the loop with AI
I personally have shifted away from prompts to documenting what needs done in a Markdown file in the project, and asking AI to implement the spec changes. It works pretty well. Claude Code works pretty well for this.
OpenSpec is an alternative to spec-kit which works great with VS-code + co-pilot