Why is everyone still talking about markdown files as the only form of spec? The argument is true for text-based specs, but that's not the only option. Stop being so text-file-brained?

This article is really attacking vague prose that pushes ambiguity onto the agent - okay, fair enough. But that's a tooling problem. What if you could express structure and relationships at a higher level than text, or map domain concepts directly to library components? People are already working on new workflows and tools to do just that!

Also, dismissing the idea that "some day we'll be able to just write the specs and the program will write itself" is especially perplexing. We're already doing it, aren't we? Yes, it has major issues but you can't deny that AI agents are enabling literally that. Those issues will get fixed.

The historical parallel matters here as well. Grady Booch (co-creator of UML) argues we're in the third golden age of software engineering:

- 1940s: abstracted away the machine -> structured programming

- 1970s: abstracted away the algorithm -> OOP, standard libraries, UML

- Now: abstracting away the code itself

Recent interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfMAtaocvJw

Each previous transition had engineers raising the same objections: "this isn't safe", "you're abstracting away my craft". They were right that something was lost, but wrong that it was fatal. Eventually the new tools worked well enough to be used in production.

> - 1970s: abstracted away the algorithm -> OOP, standard libraries, UML

Which was mostly a failure, to the point that there is a major movement towards languages that "abstract away" (in this sense) less, e.g. Rust.

Certainly if the creators of UML are saying that AI is great, that gives me more confidence than ever that it's bunk.