> What's not waterfall about this is lost on me.

Exactly. There is a spec, but there is no waterfall required to work and maintain it. Author from the article dismissed spec-based development exactly because they saw resemblance with waterfall. But waterfall isn't required for spec-centric development.

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laserlight 8 hours ago | parent [-]

> There is a spec, but there is no waterfall required to work and maintain it.

The problem with waterfall is not that you have to maintain the spec, but that a spec is the wrong way to build a solution. So, it doesn't matter if the spec is written by humans or by LLMs.

I don't see the point of maintaining a spec for LLMs to use as context. They should be able to grep and understand the code itself. A simple readme or a design document, which already should exist for humans, should be enough.

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wiseowise 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> I don't see the point of maintaining a spec for LLMs to use as context. They should be able to grep and understand the code itself.

“I don’t see the point of maintaining a documentation for developers. They should be able to grep and understand the code itself”

“I don’t see the point of maintaining tests for developers. They should be able to grep and understand the code itself”

“I don’t see the point of compilers/linters for developers. They should be able to grep and find issues themselves”

	▲	skydhash 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The thing is that the parallels you are drawing is for things that is very explicitly not the source of the code, but exists alongside it. Code is the ultimate truth. Documentation is a more humane way to describe it. Tests are there to ensure that what is there is what we want. And linters are there to warn us of specific errors. None of these create code. To go from spec to code requires a lot of decisions (each introducing technical debt). Automating the process remove control over those decisions and over the ultimate truth that is the code. But why can't the LLM retains the trace of the decisions so that it presents control point to alter the results. Instead, it's always a rewrite from scratch.
	▲	laserlight 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> “I don’t see the point of maintaining a documentation for developers. They should be able to grep and understand the code itself” I cannot think that this comment is done in good faith, when I clearly wrote above that documentation should already exist for humans: > A simple readme or a design document, which already should exist for humans, should be enough.