If by "human readable" you mean written in natural language, then those spec files will have ambiguities and imprecisions. If you make the spec precise and unambiguous enough, then it essentially just becomes a program written in code.

>The dream is that we keep agency, but also give up on reading code, by doing away with code as our level of abstraction and instead having humans edit human-readable spec files (including, say, depicting UIs directly with visual mocks). Like "no code" platforms, but for everything.

Human language is famously terrible at being unambiguous.

That's ok if you and the AI are on the same page. And it is possible to write more rigorous natural language, e.g. laws are written in human languages, and yet judges and lawyers agree on how to interpret most of them and there's a defined arbitration process to resolve any new ambiguities.

> if you and the AI are on the same page

But that's the thing, you and the AI might be "on the same page" for one prompt, and then you aren't for the next.

> and yet judges and lawyers agree on how to interpret most of them

Um, no? Lawyers and judges frequently disagree on how laws should be interpreted. And it is often not written in a way that a layperson can easily understand.

> defined arbitration process to resolve any new ambiguities.

That is famously slow and expensive, and can resul in something very different from what the lawmakers originally intended.