Specifications do not address the limitations of agentic coding

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Planet Haskell

A critical examination of the claim that agentic coding can reliably generate working software from specification documents. Using OpenAI's Symphony project as a concrete example, the author argues that two common misconceptions underpin agentic coding advocacy: that specs are simpler than code, and that spec work is inherently more thoughtful than coding. The Symphony SPEC.md is shown to contain pseudocode, database schemas, and literal code, demonstrating that sufficiently precise specs become code themselves. The author also tested Claude Code generating a Haskell implementation from the spec and found it produced buggy, non-functional results. Drawing on Dijkstra and Borges, the post concludes that 'garbage in, garbage out' applies — vague specs cannot be rescued by AI agents, and optimizing for delivery speed produces specification slop rather than genuine engineering clarity.

Haskell for all: A sufficiently detailed spec is code

16. Reference Algorithms (Language-Agnostic)