Reality is the first step
Writing is closer to thought than code by Daniel Miessler is a nice piece about spec-driven development with agents. The basic premise especially caught my attention:
I think the articulation of what you’re building, and why, is far more important. Basically, the idea. Your intent.
I think the most important thing in any project you’re building with AI (and even without it), from building a web app, to starting a business, to managing a federation of planets, is how completely and accurately you articulate exactly what you want.
Idea -> articulation -> code is a good model of how we make software, or more broadly products, but it misses the first step, and possibly also the last step, which is reality.
Ideas or intent don’t just form on their own as a human thought, they are shaped by what we see and hear, and how we make sense of the world around us. In the majority of software development cases, the starting point is understanding the problems that someone (a customer, a client, the business) brings us. What we hear and see also actively shape the boundaries of what can be articulated from these problems.
Agents are great at implementing, but less so at articulation. Skills like grill-me help with interrogation, but just answering questions is often not how the best ideas are born. People need to play and engage with ideas to be able to articulate them in an accurate manner. This is because of how ideas are shaped in the first place: by hearing and seeing things in reality, which agents can’t do for you.
Conversely, at the other end, code is just part of the story, an output. It’ll (hopefully) have an impact on the world, possibly targeting and solving the problem we started off with, leading to the next idea.
Reality is the first step and the last one, while agents can help in the messy middle.