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I think these limitations could be addressed by allowing trivial manual adjustments to the generated code before committing. And/or allowing for trivial code changes without a spec change. The judgement of "trivial" being that it still follows the spec and does not add functionality mandating a spec change. I haven't checked if they support any of this but I would be frustrated not being allowed to make such a small code change, say to fix an off-by-one error that I recently got from LLM output. The code change would be smaller than the spec change.

Cool idea overall, an incremental psuedocode compiler. Interesting to see how well it scales.

I can also see a hybrid solution with non-specced code files for things where the size of code and spec would be the same, like for enums or mapping tables.

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As far as I can tell C is not a new language, but rather an alternative workflow for assembly development along with a tool that implements it.
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I second that :)
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> The limitation seems to be that you can't modify the code yourself if you want the spec to reflect it

Eventually, we'll end up in a world where humans don't need to touch code, but we are not there yet. We are looking into ways to "catch up" the specs with whatever changes happen in the code not through CodeSpeak (agents or manual changes or whatever). It's an interesting exercise. In the case of agents, it's very helpful to look at the prompts users gave them (we are experimenting with inspecting the sessions from ~/.claude).

More generally, `codespeak takeover` [1] is a tool to convert code into specs, and we are teaching it to take prompts from agent sessions into account. Seems very helpful, actually.

I think it's a valid use case to start something in vibe coding mode and then switch to CodeSpeak if you want long-term maintainability. From "sprint mode" to "marathon mode", so to speak

[1] https://codespeak.dev/blog/codespeak-takeover-20260223

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> Eventually, we'll end up in a world where humans don't need to touch code, but we are not there yet.

Will we though? Wouldn't AI need to reach a stage where it is a tool, like a compiler, which is 100% deterministic?

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Two things to mention here:

1. You are right that we can redefine what is code. If code is the central artefact that humans are dealing with to tell machines and other humans how the system works, then CodeSpeak specs will become code, and CodeSpeak will be a compiler. This is why I often refer to CodeSpeak as a next-level programming language.

2. I don't think being deterministic per se is what matters. Being predictable certainly does. Human engineers are not deterministic yet people pay them a lot of money and use their work all the time.

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We will and soon because it does not have to be deterministic like a compiler. It only has to pass all tests.
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Who is writing the tests?
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There are different kinds of tests:

* regression tests – can be generated

* conformance tests – often can be generated

* acceptance tests – are another form of specification and should come from humans.

Human intent can be expressed as

* documents (specs, etc)

* review comments, etc

* tests with clear yes/no feedback (data for automated tests, or just manual testing)

And this is basically all that matters, see more here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/abreslav_so-what-would-you-sa...

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In the future users will write the tests
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Compiler is not 100% deterministic. Its output can change when you upgrade its version, its output can change when you change optimization options. Using profile-guided optimization can also change between runs.
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If you change inputs then obviously you will get a different output. Crucially using the same inputs, however, produces the same output. So compilers are actually deterministic.
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Why are we eliminating our own job and maybe hobby so eagerly? Whatever. It is done.
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Also they seem to want to run this as a business, which seems absurd to me since I don't see how they can possibly charge money, and anyway the idea is so simple that it can be reimplemented in less than a week (less than a day for a basic version) and those alternative implementations may turn out to be better.

It also seems to be closed-source, which means that unless they open the source very soon it will very likely be immediately replaced in popularity by an open source version if it turns out to gain traction.

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Also a bit formal. Maybe something like this will be the output of the prompt to let me know what the AI is going to generate in the binary, but I doubt I will be writing code like this in 5 years, English will probably be fine at my level.
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> Also it seems that the tool severely limits the configurability of the agentic generation process, although that's just a limitation of the specific tool.

Working on that as well. We need to be a lot more flexible and configurable

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