Today I realised that technical specifications have come full circle in importance.
We’ve been agile for so long, with focus on short sprints; and I don’t think we need to throw away those benefits.
But with AI, you can now plan the system on a very wide scale from the beginning.
I also realised today that I have been thinking too small when it comes to AI. Whatever you think the capabilities of AI are, you are probably underestimating it.
Today we put together a loose specification of about 3000 lines. Broadly speaking these included:
- database schemas
- user stories
- features
- UIs
- component structures
Using Cursor we would ask it to amend a technical specification MD file as we mapped out the idea from scratch again. Thank to Shaun who pointed this idea out which I’ve sort of tweaked now.
From this technical specification we asked it to build a vanilla HTML/JS frontend prototype.
The purpose of this was to see whether the AI could correctly interpret the spec.
So we went back and forth from the tech spec to prototype, and were able to hone it after a few iterations. This allowed us humans to visually see what we were building.
I won’t share the prototype UI yet, but suffice to say it reduced several days of work down to an hour or so.
Crazy times.
Leave a Reply