alt Hacker NewsIn the long run, it's going to become about specifications.
Code is valuable because it tells computers what you want them to do. If that can be done at a higher level, by writing a great specification that lets some AI dark factory somewhere just write the app for you in an hour, then the code is now worthless but the spec is as valuable as the code ever was. You can just recode the entire app any time you want a change! And even if AI deletes itself from existence or whatever, a detailed specification is still worth a lot.
Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications is going to get a lot of attention over the next ~decade.
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One of the unexpected benefits of everyone scrambling to show that they used AI to do their job is that the value of specs and design documents are dawning on people who previously scoffed at them as busywork. Previously, if I wanted to spend a day writing a detailed document containing a spec and discussion of tradeoffs and motivations, I'd have to hide it from my management. Now, I'm writing it for the AI so it's fine.
> Whoever figures out how to describe useful software in a way that can get AI agents to reliably rebuild it from human-authored specifications
Which is why I think there's very little threat to the various tech career paths from AI.
Humans suck at writing specifications or defining requirements for software. It's always been the most difficult and frustrating part of the process, and always will be. And that's just actually articulating the requirements, to say nothing of the process of even agreeing on the requirements in the first place to even start writing the spec.
If a business already cannot clearly define what they need to an internal dev team, with experts that can somewhat translate the messy business logic, then they have a total of zero hope to ever do the same but to an unthinking machine and expect any kind of reliable output.