Chapter 5. Specs as Leverage
Every ambiguity you leave in a spec gets resolved without you, once per agent that reads it.
A friend ran an experiment I keep thinking about. He’d been putting off a small annoying feature, a reporting endpoint on an internal tool, the kind of thing that takes a senior engineer a day if they’re feeling slow. He gave an agent a one-paragraph description and got a working PR back in about 12 minutes. He’d been a skeptic of code generation agents for a long time, and within the hour the endpoint compiled, ran, and passed his tests. Then he got greedy.
He ran the same paragraph against five agents in parallel, spawned across five worktrees, and went to make coffee.
The five PRs all compiled and worked as described. Each read like the output of a competent, well-intentioned engineer. None of them solved the same problem. One built the endpoint with a different auth model. One silently changed the response shape. One wrote to a different database. One was technically correct with the world’s most useless query interface stapled on. ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access