I have similar feelings. I’m willing to believe there are scenarios where this kind of thing makes sense, maybe – a colleague has had great success on a small, predictable greenfield project with it. I don’t work on many of those. My main objections are that I’ve had plenty of success with LLMs without intermediate detailed specs (and I don’t think my failures would have been helped by them), and I just don’t like the idea of primarily reviewing specs. Some sort of plan or research document is a different matter - that’s fine. But the kind of code-like formalised spec thing? I want to look at code, it’s just easier. Plus, I’m going to be reviewing the code too (not doing so is irresponsible in my opinion), so having spec AND code is now double the text to read.

The part of the process the actually needs improving, in my experience in larger codebases, is the research phase, not the implementation. With good, even quite terse research, it’s easy to iterate on a good implementation and then probably take over to finish it off.

I really think LLMs and their agent systems should be kept in their place as tools, first and foremost. We’re still quite early in their development, and they’re still fundamentally unreliable, that I don’t think we should be re-working over-arching work practices around them.

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macrolime 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've found that SDD is actually what you need to be able to work with code bases when they go above around 100 000 lines of code. It's what unlocked getting LLMs to work well with large codebases for me.

	▲	dwb 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I still don't get it, can you clarify? It's not the research phase that I'm disputing. Clearly for a large codebase, you need some good way to take all that information (code, product knowledge) and distill it down to something that can fit in the context, ready for implementation. And it's that research that is going to get harder the bigger the codebase. (My current experience is with a repo around 1.5 million lines.) I'm saying that the output of that research, in my experience, doesn't need to be anything like the detail of an exact spec. It can be a sort of one-to-two-pager Markdown doc, at most – and any further detail is much more ergonomic for me to iterate over in the form of code.

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ErrantX 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeh I think you are right and I am also finding larger apps built using SDD steadily get harder to extend.

> For large existing codebases, SDD is mostly unusable.

I don't really agree with the overall blog post (my view is all of these approaches have value, and we are still to early on to fnd the One True Way) but that point is very true.