The New Code — Sean Grove, OpenAI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rABwKRsec4
This is a really interesting short talk about how English is the new programming language, and how specification is the new hot skill. Andrei Karpathy said a similar thing in June this year at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School, where he described “Software 3.0” as basically being programming LLMs using English.
In this talk, Sean Grove — who works on alignment reasoning at OpenAI — talks about the OpenAI Model Spec, which is a detailed specification of how ChatGPT should behave. It’s a really interesting document, and it’s worth spending a bit of time looking at it to get a feel of how ChatGPT is expected to behave. Grove explains how they use this document to train ChatGPT:
- The model is given a difficult question.
- Another model scores the response against the Model Spec.
- The model has its weights adjusted accordingly.
Thus the Model Spec is essentially like a programming specification.
He makes the very good point that when vibe coding, people tend to throw away the prompt and keep the code. But really the prompt is the most important thing — using it you should be able to generate the code again, and improving it should improve the final code. He says that being able to write good specifications is now the key to this new style of software engineering.
He also talks about laws as being specifications for a country, a kind of programming specification for how a country is run. I have heard the brilliant Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former Digital Minister, make this point — comparing a change in a law to being like making a branch in GitHub.
He ends speculating that the programmers IDE may become a tool to clarify your thoughts, an “Integrated Thought Clarifier”.
My first job, around 1996, was for a company called Logica Finance in Central London, in Marlborough Street just off Oxford Street. Logica had a product called FASTWIRE (which still exists), which safely transferred money between international banks via networks like SWIFT and by other means. It moved literally hundreds of millions of dollars between banks every single day. I learnt programming with Logica. Since the software was so important, the programming methodology was very strict. We would do Requirements Analysis, Requirements Specification, then a Functional Specification, then a Technical Specification, a Test Plan, and finally the code itself would be written. Once written and tested the code would be reviewed line by line in a code review meeting with perhaps five or six experienced coders. I remember the documentation for the product was a whole long shelf of dozens of A4 binders. As you might imagine, creating code in this way was very expensive. But it was a great for me to learn how important detailed specification is. In a year or two it should be possible to give an LMM a detailed specification and for it to write the code and test it, no programming required. Specification is the new programming.