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

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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.

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Sue Smith Feb 1

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

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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.

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Sue Smith Feb 1

Part of what makes me think this is that teaching folk to build using LLMs means they'd get inconsistent results to their inputs, which would be a disastrous situation when learning to code, you can't build a foundation skillset without seeing consistent results for the same actions.

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Doug

@sue it reminds of when when I learned to code for the web - tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver made it "easy", but I never for a moment thought what was produced was ready for anything serious.

I love to see the excitement for what it's like to create a working application. But I don't know where the confidence to publish it publicly is coming from.