This is an experimental thought. If people are vibe coding apps without looking at code, the argument here is that maybe ad-hoc prompts is not the best way to capture that because you lose the instructions. So the proposal, why not have those instructions saved as markdown files at least we have a reference in English.

We don't look at binaries, we don't look at assembly, we work with high level languages. The specs were for developers to translate to programming primitives, but if the translation is largely automated, then the specs will become the code and we will need better ways to manage those, and I think the IDEs are gradually trending that way, look at all the most recent agentic dev tools, it surely follows that trend.

With respect to not having this piece on HN. If the author is seeing many organizations doing this practice, then why he would not share that empirical observation? is it only because it is against your pure world and abstractions? Just the recent leak for the Muse agent shows that most of the system behaviour is written in markdown.

Whether you like it or not, technology never care about purest and idealist, it evolve under pressure of deliveries and pragmatic choices, and if there is such a pressure, which the author claims to be, then HN is the medium to share it.

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maxk42 10 hours ago | parent [-]

I like how you wrote "the argument here is that maybe ad-hoc prompts is not the best way to capture that because you lose the instructions" as if you didn't begin this thread by contradicting my statement "Docs in VCS, yes." and claiming I missed the entire point of the post. It seems you've now agreed with me and yet still somehow wish to argue. I think you've missed the point of my post. You should reflect on that.

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aogaili 7 hours ago | parent [-]

But these are NOT docs in VCS. Docs in VCS were for references for developers. The ask here is to treat them as the source for instructions.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, I don't know.

	▲	maxk42 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Of course the src directory is in VCS - it's arguably the entire point of the VCS. The entire project - including documentation - should be in VCS. Documentation is not source and should not be treated like it. But it is crucial to generating the source and always has been treated as a second-class consideration. Now that we have AI agents that can handle all the fine details of keeping the documentation up to date, I believe. We seem to be in agreement that docs should be under revision control. So the only point we seem to disagree on is where they go. My original claim was that they don't belong under the src directory. I still maintain that position. You could say that the broader point of the article was to put them under VCS and I started out with that position so there is no disagreement there. I just think it's poorly thought-out to place them under the src directory and it's even more shortsighted to place the docs in a subdirectory called 'md'. To me, these seem like the thoughts of someone who is just discovering how to craft code with the assistance of AI: They're good initial instincts, and potentially just a handful of completed projects away from a better solution, which is what people have been doing since before AI: Keep the docs separate. Keep them under revision. Keep them up to date. But documentation is not source, and even if you specify the project in intricate detail you're not going to get the same deterministic result by piping them through the same AI. And that's always been the way documentation has worked: It specifies things in as much detail as we can, but in the end someone has to translate that into source code. And typically the person writing that source code has to make decisions or trade-offs that were never specified in the docs. Now with AI agents we're able to back-port every line of reasoning into the docs and create much better and more up-to-date documentation, and that's exactly how I build with AI. But we're not able to treat the documentation as if it's a deterministic system that will generate the same outputs each time. Therefore it is meaningfully different from source code and should be treated as such. (Although it should be kept very close to the source code in a structure that is intuitive and appropriate for the project.) In any event: If we're talking past each other or simply not understanding one another then I thank you for a respectful conversation.