Software in a Spec-First World

Reading one of Andrej Karpathy’s recent articles made me think a lot about the future of software and software engineering. The obvious part is that we’ll “code in English” more and more. The less obvious part is what replaces code as the main thing we build, share, and sell . My bet: specs . Specs become the product For anything non-trivial, the hard part stays the same: what should this software do, exactly? That’s domain knowledge, tradeoffs, edge cases, definitions, and taste : an intuition for what “good” software should feel like . A lot of what designers and great engineers contribute lives there. This is why the near future isn’t “everyone asks super-Siri for a serious business app and instantly gets it.” For real systems, you still need iterative clarification, disagreement, and decision-making. Agents compress the build, not the thinking. The big change is who gets to participate : dedicated domain experts (not just engineers) can be directly involved in shaping software, bec