It's really weird, I'm seeing across the board that people who never believed in them before are suddenly all into good software eng practices (starting with writing a spec) because of AI.

It's kind of fascinating that we never were willing to do these things for humans but now that AI needs it ... we are all in. A bit depressing in the sense that I think mostly the reason we happy to do it for AI is that we perceive it will benefit us personally rather than some abstract future human.

> It's really weird, I'm seeing across the board that people who never believed in them before are suddenly all into good software eng practices (starting with writing a spec) because of AI.

> It's kind of fascinating that we never were willing to do these things for humans but now that AI needs it ... we are all in. A bit depressing in the sense that I think mostly the reason we happy to do it for AI is that we perceive it will benefit us personally rather than some abstract future human.

I don't think that's the reason.

I think it's because they take time, and few people were willing to put in time for "maybe it'll make writing the actual code faster" gains when the code was going to take a few times longer to write itself.

You also can get faster feedback to iterate on your spec now, which improves the probability of it helping future-you.

So combine that with the fact that the llms are more likely to get lost if you don't spec stuff in advance, and the value of up-front work is higher (whereas a human is more likely to land on the right track, just more slowly than otherwise, making the value harder to quantify).

My friend at a faang was talking about the "massive overhauls to make everything ready for ai". I asked for an example. He said "basically just documenting the shit out of everything"

I guess that just never occurred to anybody before.

My manager just told me that after 12 years of trying to get one of the founders to understand the difference between dev docs and user docs, they tried getting Claude to do it and he finally got it that they are different. He'd been saying this whole time that customer could just read the dev docs. If they could they wouldn't need our software.

I always knew the dev world leaned more toward interesting technical challenges and interoperability than maximizing the benefit to humanity- it’s why I switched to design. However, I didn’t realize the intensity of that preference until the entire industry got ridiculously AI-pilled.

It’s an interesting psychological phenomenon. It’s like the way I keep my house way tidier since I got a robot vacuum. Pick things up off the floor for aesthetics’ sake? Nah. Pick them up because the vacuum will attempt to eat them and might get sick? Of course!