> Writing detailed specs and then giving them to an AI is not the optimal way to work with AI. > That's vibecoding with an extra documentation step.

Read uncharitably, yeah. But you're making a big assumption that the writing of spec wasn't driven by the developer, checked by developer, adjusted by developer. Rewritten when incorrect, etc.

> You can still make the decisions, call the shots

One way to do this is to do the thinking yourself, tell it what you want it to do specifically and... get it to write a spec. You get to read what it thinks it needs to do, and then adjust or rewrite parts manually before handing off to an agent to implement. It depends on task size of course - if small or simple enough, no spec necessary.

It's a common pattern to hand off to a good instruction following model - and a fast one if possible. Gemini 3 Flash is very good at following a decent spec for example. But Sonnet is also fine.

> Stop trying to use it as all-or-nothing

Agree. Some things just aren't worth chasing at the moment. For example, in native mobile app development, it's still almost impossible to get accurate idiomatic UI that makes use of native components properly and adheres to HIG etc