Hey, you seem to have similar view on this. I know ideas are cheap but hear me out:

You talk with agent A it only modifies this spec, you still chat and can say "make it prettier" but that agent only modifies the spec, the spec could also separate "explicit" from "inferred".

And of course agent B which builds only sees the spec.

User actually can care about diffs generated by agent A again, because nobody wants to verify diffs on agents generated code full of repetition and created by search and replace. I believe if somebody implements this right it will be the way things are done.

And of course with better models spec can be used to actually meaningfully improve the product.

Long story short what industry misses currently and what you seem to be understanding is that intent is sacred. It should be always stored, preferably verbatim and always with relevant context ("yes exactly" is obviously not enough). Current generation of LLMs can already handle all that. It would mean like 2-3x cost but seem so much worth it (and the cost on the long run could likely go below 1x given typical workflows and repetitions)

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beshrkayali 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Right, the spec/build separation is exactly the idea and Ossature is already built that way on the build side.

I agree a dedicated layer for intent capture makes a lot of sense. I thought about that as well, I am just not fully convinced it has to be conversational (or free-form conversational). Writing a prompt to get the right spec change is still a skill in itself, and it feels like it'd just be shifting the problem upstream rather than actually solving it. A structured editing experience over specs feels like it'd be more tractable to me. But the explicit vs inferred distinction you mention is interesting and worth thinking through more.

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comboy 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The spec manually crafted the user is ideal.

It's just that we're lazy. After being able to chat, I don't see people going back. You can't just paste some error into the specs, you can't paste it image and say it make it look more like this. Plus however well designed the spec, something like "actually make it always wait for the user feedback" can trigger changes in many places (even for the sake of removing contradictions).

	▲	ithkuil 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The spec can be wrong for many reasons: 1. You can write a spec that builds something that is not what you actually wanted 2. You can write spec that is incoherent with itself or with the external world 3. You can write a spec that doesn't have sufficient mechanical sympathy with the tooling you have and so it requires you to all spec out more and more of the surrounding tech than you practically can. All of those issues can be addressed by iterating on the spec with the help of agents. It's just an engineering practice, one that we have to become better at understanding

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4b11b4 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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4b11b4 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

yep but spec isn't the root

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viktorianer 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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