Why AI Conversations Beat Auto-Generated Specs in Software Planning

A software developer argues that the popular workflow of generating a full specification document via AI before coding skips the most valuable part of the planning process. The author contends that AI tools are most effective when used interactively and iteratively, while the idea is still forming, rather than as a one-shot spec generator. The core concern is that an auto-generated spec commits to assumptions early, causing a single flawed premise to silently propagate through all subsequent decisions before any human review occurs. In contrast, a real-time back-and-forth conversation with an AI model allows developers to catch and correct wrong turns at each decision point, before further logic is built on top of them. The piece concludes that a spec should be a record of completed thinking, not a substitute for the reasoning process itself.