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Yes and every AI-first development workflow worth its salt does exactly this, and it does it much more thoroughly than I’ve ever seen a team of meatbags do it.

My workflow, at a high level, is:

1. I write a high level spec. Not as high level as a single-sentence prompt, but high level enough to capture my top requirements.

2. I prompt the AI to interview me about the spec to clear up any ambiguity or open questions, then when I’m satisfied, the AI writes a longer spec, which I then review.

3. Then I prompt the AI to write an implementation plan based on the spec. I might just skim this, and by this point I might be asking the LLM more questions than it’s asking me.

4. Now I hand it off to the implementer agent.

This isn’t cowboy coding, it’s not even agile. It’s waterfall. The problem with doing waterfall was that it’s too slow, especially with the deserialization/serialization cost of routing all of this documentation through meatbrains. The LLM is doing just as much work, true, but faster.

The thing I found surprising was that, while LLM’s are still pretty awful at writing as an art form, they are better technical writers than I have the time to be, especially when writing for an audience of other LLM’s.

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"has nothing to do with proper software engineering"

So you're saying software engineers don't write code? Just because there are other things that SWEs do, does not mean it has nothing to do with it.

It's arguably a pretty important part. Would you really hire a software engineer who can't code?

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Writing code and copying the output of an LLM is absolutely not the same.

You wouldn't call someone an author that takes LLM outputs and shoves it in a book. IDK why this distinction doesn't apply to devs too.

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You call someone an author when they use a ghostwriter. They're giving inputs that are core to the output, even though they aren't doing all the writing. Same thing.
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I can assure you a sizable amount of people in the writing community look down on "authors" that only use ghostwriters.

Why do tech workers act shock that people hate this junk being force fed to them that they are now resorting to violence to reject said junk?

You think telling humans with specialized crafts that they don't matter is good politics? Good grief.

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What's a good example of human-led design?
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