alt Hacker NewsThe specification for most systems _is the code_. English cannot describe business rules as succinctly as code, and most business rules end up being implied from a spec rather than directly specified, at least in my experience.
The thought of converting an app back into a spec document or list of feature requests seems crazy to me.
Why would it be? If you can describe an approximation of a system and regenerate it to be, let’s say, 98% accurate in 1% of the time that it would take to generate it by hand (and that’s being generous, it’s probably more like 0.1% in today’s day and age and that decimal is only moving left) aren’t there a giant set of use cases where the approximation of the system is totally fine? People will always bring up “but what about planes and cars and medicine and critical life or death systems”. Yeah sure, but a vast majority of the systems an end user interacts with every day do not have that level of risk tolerance