> If you make the specs detailed enough so that there's no misunderstanding possible: you've just written code, what we already do today

This was my opinion for a very long time. Having build a few applications from scratch using AI, though, nowadays I think: Sometimes not everything needs to be spelled out. Like in math papers some details can be left to the ~~reader~~LLM and it'll be fine.

I mean, in many cases it doesn't really matter what exactly the code looks like, as long as it ends up doing the right thing. For a given Turing machine, the equivalence class of equivalent implementations is infinite. If a short spec written in English leads the LLM to identify the correct equivalence class, that's all we need and, in fact, a very impressive compression result.