Mastodawn

"The specification language gets more precise over time, because natural language is ambiguous and different models interpret the same prompt differently. You add more structure. You define exact function signatures. You specify return types. You nail down error handling behavior with enough precision that two different models should produce interchangeable output. The specification starts looking less like English prose and more like a programming language."

https://nesbitt.io/2026/01/30/will-ai-make-package-managers-redundant.html

Will AI Make Package Managers Redundant?

Following the prompt registry idea to its logical conclusion.

Andrew Nesbitt

Show thread

Sue Smith Feb 1

This is obviously a thought experiment but I can genuinely see a lot of these spec driven projects going this way, at some point you're trying to do something that would have been easier just using an existing high level programming language.

Show thread

Sue Smith Feb 1

Which might be an indictment of how badly we've taught these programming languages tbh lol.

Show thread

Sue Smith Feb 1

Honestly I think there is a lot to this, when I see some of the guides to using LLMs for folk without coding skills I think I could more easily just teach them to code. The mystification of coding is also a huge part of the appeal of this stuff for lots of people.

Show thread

Greg Wilson Feb 1

@sue +100 to this, except I think that learning to code has become more daunting than ever thanks to package managers, CI/CD, linting tools, etc. - I've been doing this a while, and I find lists like https://willigottstein.medium.com/from-good-code-to-reliable-software-a-practical-guide-to-production-ready-python-packages-aa881c2c31e9 intimidating. (Type hints in Python? Whatever happened to the friendly, approachable little language I once knew?)

From Good Code to Reliable Software: A Practical Guide to Production-Ready Python Packages

Most of us have written Python that worked beautifully — right up until someone else tried to install it, run it on a different machine or…

Medium

Eder Feb 1

Show thread

Sue Smith

@gvwilson It definitely has, you can't even make a simple website without a "build" process etc, we've overcomplicated the fuck out of everything and now those patterns are baked into LLM output.