Your example is heavily underspecified. In what form are people’s details added? How is the list printed? A spec that’s actually implementable will be a good deal longer. One that defines behaviour completely (what ordering should you use for equal weights?) will be longer still.
The HTML and ECMAScript specs that comprise most of what we’re talking about are very much closer to line-by-line, because they’re designed to be both implementable and completely specified.
Write a program that keeps track of the name and weight of each person added, sorted by weight, lightest to heaviest. The input should be a command line prompt asking for input in 3 fields - first name, last name, weight. If two people have the same weight, order them alphabetically by last name. At the end, when a blank line is entered, print the list with headings first name, last name, weight. Check the input, if it's not 3 sections or empty, print an error explaining the input format.
497 input characters, 1317 output characters.
In the case of a detailed or verbose spec, you're probably right. I'm just replying to the assertion that it generally takes many words of English to equal little code. If that were true, nobody would be using ChatGPT to scaffold.
Now, if you're going to be detailed about -how- each line should look, I'd agree that English would be more verbose than code.
Still seriously underspecified for an interoperable spec. You haven’t defined the input or output forms anywhere near precisely enough, or how to order alphabetically by last name (sorting depends on locale: e.g. is æ equivalent to ae—though that still raises stability questions—a letter after a, a letter after z, something else? I think there are languages that treat it as each of these. Or are you just rejecting anything beyond ASCII letters, which will cause different trouble?), or what to do about two people with the same weight and last name.
Web specs need to consider all of these sorts of things. That’s why they’re verbose—they’re designed to be implementable and complete.
But we don't, really. Example:
Write a function that keeps track of the name and weight of each person added, then prints the list, sorted by weight, lightest to heaviest.
I asked GPT this. My 140 character, unoptimized query resulted in 816 characters of c++ code.