This is inefficient. If quality matters at all, you’re going to miss things in your English design doc and/or use 100 words where 1 line of code will do.
If quality (as in product, not code) doesn’t matter then sure, do whatever. LLM will fill in the gaps.
> world where $20 quartz-movement watches have appeared
Much like in real life, if you’re paying for a cheap knock off you get what you pay for. Also much like real life, plenty of people will pay for $20 knock offs and be content.
Check out Hodinkee and Monochrome Watches to see all the hand built watches announced everyday. $100,000 and up. People appreciate craft, beauty, tradition, and are willing to pay.
I think it makes sense. You're in a company full of many teams and people are building things, some manual, some autogenerated, some hybrid. When you notice that people are rebuilding many of the same things, of course you're not going to keep using LLMs to regenerate the basics of the universe. So you pick the very best and use that as the starting point, not tabula rasa markdown file.
Your AI fix it, and you take it your users. Users come back with a new bug. You ask your AI about it. AI says, "Sure, I didn't handle it because you didn't say so!"
That's one of the things that has drastically changed, in my opinion. One way to look at it could be: in the past it was okay to have a minimal design spec doc, if your programmer wrote excellent code and comments, and the system wasn't too big.
But now, you can't complete if you try to do it that way while not using AI. You need to take all that effort that used to go into good code and good comments, and put it into a good spec doc, and hand that file to the AI.
So that once the AI has built your system, you can say either "hey AI, a bug just showed up in the widget area, go look at your strange spaghetti code of yours and the design doc and fix it", or, "hey AI, the whole sub-system seems to have gone critical mess, take the code, spec doc, lessons learned, and the following few high-level design decision changes, and re-write the whole thing!"
Apologies for bluntness, but there just isn't going to be much need in this world for people that are excellent at hand-building intricate watches, in a world where $20 quartz-movement watches have appeared.