Adam Tornhill published a piece today that I found myself nodding along to almost paragraph by paragraph. His argument: Spec-Driven Development, in its strong form, is a replay of the Model-Driven Architecture dream from the 1990s — and it will fail for the same reasons. Implementation is not the execution of a known scope. It is the discovery of scope that wasn’t known yet. He’s right. And I want to pick up where he stops. ...
In my previous post, I argued that full specification fails with AI — and that component-based architecture with clear interfaces is the right model. Since then, several readers pointed me to a similar argument by Javi Lopez, who draws a sharp parallel to the CASE tools of the late 1980s: the same promise, the same illusion, a new mask. Lopez is right. And I want to go one step further — not just to say what goes wrong, but to show what it looks like when it goes wrong, and what it takes to recover. ...
Over the past months, I have experimented extensively with using AI in software and system architecture. One pattern became increasingly clear: We try to use AI like a compiler. We assume that if we specify enough, the AI should be able to generate an entire system. But this approach fails consistently. Not because AI is “too dumb” — but because we are using the wrong model. In this article, I explain why full specification does not work with AI and which architectural model does. ...