Disagree completely. The spec is vital so that future changes continue to conform to it. Specs absolutely need to live in the VCS, because they continue to be needed to keep the code conformant. They essentially are a form of code now. And code goes in the VCS.

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staticshock 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

At scale, specs can only be vital to the degree to which their conformance testing is automated. Good specs should use a formal, runnable verification language. Otherwise you'll accumulate specs that are right when they ship, wrong in subtle ways 3 months in, and wrong in glaring ways 6 months in. AI doesn't change this dynamic, it amplifies it.

	▲	seanmcdirmid 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		But conformance testing is where agents really excel at if you set things up right: * Black-box testing: the agent writing the tests cannot see implementation and the agent writing implementation cannot see tests, they only agree on a spec and an interface (the minimum needed to write tests). * Evaluate test coverage using code coverage, but when gaps are found communicate those gaps in terms of the specification. Good specs should be grounded (complete and not ambiguous), they don't need to be formal. You should be able to re-run your agents when the spec changes on diffs to the spec, and if a change happens out of bad, you should have agents that go in and propose fixes to the spec. Since agents are doing deterministic codegen like a compiler would, this is all pretty straightforward. You also need to consider public and internal specifications (the public specification being for reuse of the component), and you might test your integrating component with a test-double (built from the public specification alone) rather than the real component itself.