In my 30 years of software development, maybe 5 of them were in places were getting people to provide a formal spec was ever an option.
It's also irrelevant if LLM's can follow them - the way I use Claude Code is to have it get things roughly working, supply test cases showing where it fails, then review and clean up the code or go additional rounds with more test cases.
That's not much different to how I work with more junior engineers, who are slower and not all that much less error-prone, though the errors are different in character.
If you can't improve coding speed with LLM's, maybe your style of working just isn't amenable to it, or maybe you don't know the tooling well enough - for me it's sped things up significantly.
The fact that getting a formal spec is impossible is precisely why you need to hire a developer with a big salary and generous benefits.
The formal spec lives only in the developer's head. It's the only way.
Does an LLM coding agent provide any value here?
Hardly. It's just an excuse for the developer to waste time futzing around "coding" when what they're really paid to do is cram that ineffable but very much important formal spec into their heads.
It works just fine to use an LLM coding agent in cases like this, but you need to be aware of what you're actually trying to do with them and be specific instead of assuming they'll magic up the spec from thin air.
I don't know. The other day I wanted to display an Active Directory object to the user. The dict had around 20 keys like "distinguishedname" and the "createdat" with timestamps like 144483738. I wanted friendly display names in a sensible order and have binary values converted to human readable values.
Very easy to do, sure, but the LLM did this in one minute, recognized the context and correctly converted binary values where as this would have taken me maybe 30 minutes of looking up standards and docs and typing in friendly key names.
I also told it to create five color themes and apply them to the CSS. It worked on the first attempt and it looks good, much better than what I could have had produced by thinking of themes, picking colors and copying RGB codes back and forth. Also I'm not fluent in CSS.
Though I wasn't paid for this, it's a hobby project, which I wouldn't have started in the first place without an LLM performing the boring tedious tasks.
For me it's mainly adding quick and dirty hooks to Wordpress websites from berating marketing c-suits for websites that are gonna disappear or never visited anymore in less than a few months.
For that, whatever Claude spits out is more than enough. I'm reasonably confident I'm not going to write much better code in the less-than-30-minutes I'm allowed to spend to fix whatever issue comes up.
It's very marmite. I used to hate it when it was vscode's crappy copilot. Now with Cursor and Windsurf, after some onboarding, I find it indispensable. I have used AI for coding for 3 separate roles:
- freelancer
- CTO
- employee
And in all 3 cases, AI has increased my productivity, and I could ship things even when I'm really sleepy or if I have very little time between things, I can send a prompt to an agent and then review things, and then when I have more time, I can clean up some of the mess.
Now my stance is really at "Whoever doesn't take advantage of it is NGMI"
You're specifically very wrong at "LLM's cannot do: following a formal spec in a particular problem domain". It does take skill to ensure that they will, though, for sure.
No, it's more like knowing the strengths and weaknesses, and if the work is good, accepting, and if not good, directing in the right way. The latter may take some time to learn, for sure, but not that much, and once you know, it's faster and faster.
Programmers aren't paid for coding, they're paid for following a formal spec in a particular problem domain. (Something that LLM's can't do at all.)
Improving coding speed is a red herring and a scam.