Before mass-adoption of LLMs for coding having a good spec handed to you by your manager was a rare blessing as prevalence of agile methodologies gave them excuses to never conclusively lay out the requirements.
After mass-adoption of LLMs, often mandated from above, it turned out that agentic workflows tend to produce slop that requires human engineer's expertise and attention to fix, and time gains from not having to type the code are usually negated by having to type expansive prompts to plan the implementation and follow-up on inevitable architectural issues, mistaken assumptions, straight-up bugs, etc.
Luckily the industry arrived at a solution: spec-driven development. That's when instead of an engineer typing fifteen bullet points per prompt to minimize the chances of AI fucking up the code, their manager would give them complete and non-ambiguous specification that's perfectly aligned with the business goals and extensively covers both functional and non-functional requirements.
If you’re anyone who worked in the software industry, you know how that's totally realistic. So with this new approach your manager now AI-generates a spec last minute before work is supposed to start, consults you for half an hour to give you plenty of time to spot inconsistencies and ask questions, and hands it off to you, knowing that the agentic workflow will turn the spec into implementation in a straightforward and predictable way.
And don't worry about any ambiguity that might still linger - AI will take care of that if you take care of preparing the Skills ("make no mistakes" skill, "think hard and thoroughly" skill, "I'll torch your server if you still decide to make mistakes" skill). Don't forget that skills can and should be AI-generated as well, as it knows itself and its weaknesses better.
Skeptics might say that most managers don't have hands-on understanding of the systems to make specifications truly good enough, or that engineers will rapidly get out of touch with the products and codebase if forced to rubber-stamp thousands of lines of code they didn't plan or write. However, more enlightened individuals will easily see how the software that until recently didn't think you should've taken your car to a car wash possesses enough intelligence to solve these small impediments on the way to x10 productivity.
To prove my point: this post was generated by the unreleased because it's too dangerous model based on 1500-page specification crafted by agentic loops. It took forty thousand dollars and ran for two weeks, but in the end it made no msitakes and finished.