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Increasingly convinced that specs are now the source and that code is an artifact akin to a lockfile.

ok I wouldn't put quite it like this, and I say this as someone for whom conversations with claude are a first-class object and have been for like the past year

well, for one thing, specs can be misunderstood or mistaken or their translations may have unintentional side effects, and you can't tell sometimes what the overall effect of a system would be at scale or in edge cases. in many non-trivial instances you can't get 1:1 parity in the translation,

you can't directly EXECUTE the spec, you can't interrogate it online, and sometimes it takes less information to just have the code than the overall spec justifying it takes up; natural language shifts and changes in different times and places and contexts,

and also context poisoning somewhere in the underlying interpreting system could recontextualize the output to contain more vulnerabilities it's also much more expensive to regenerate code and then go through a potentially expensive build/qa process to fix a typo that has second/third-order effects