alt Hacker News> What if that process changes and the language you’re reading is a natural one instead of code?
Natural language is not a good way to specify computer systems. This is a lesson we seem doomed to forget again and again. It's the curse of our profession: nobody wants to learn anything if it gets in the way of the latest fad. There's already a historical problem in software engineering: the people asking for stuff use plain language, and there's a need to convert it to a formal spec, and this takes time and is error prone. But it seems we are introducing a whole new layer of lossy interpretation to the whole mess, and we're doing this happily and open eyed because fuck the lessons of software engineering.
I could see LLMs being used to check/analyze natural language requirements and help turn them into formal requirements though.
> But it seems we are introducing a whole new layer of lossy interpretation to the whole mess (...)
I recommend you get acquainted with LLMs and code assistants, because a few of your assertions are outright wrong. Take for example any of the mainstream spec-driven development frameworks. All they do is walk you through the SRS process using a set of system prompts to generate a set of documents featuring usecases, functional requirements, and refined tasks in the form of an actionable plan.
Then you feed that plan to a LLM assistant and your feature is implemented.
I seriously recommend you check it out. This process is far more structured and thought through than any feature work that your average SDE ever does.