Prompt engineering is dead – everything is a specification

Specifications

Specifications are THE key asset. It is the natural progression as coding languages have evolved, as this image shows:

When you write code, you don’t fix the assembler that the compiler creates. You rely on the code and fix that. Code is the asset. When you drag-and-drop a Flow, you don’t check the XML it creates and change that. You use the design canvas. The Flow diagram is the asset. So now we are vibe coding, the specification becomes the critical asset. Sean Grove brilliant’s presentation on the subject from when he was at OpenAI.

Business analysis is the core skill

So you need to get really good at writing credible, unambiguous specifications to describe the business need, the outcomes, the UI patterns. Career advice: get better at business analysis and writing unambiguous specifications. And you need specific industry and domain expertise to be able to understand in detail the problem and the requirements. For example, Field Service in downstream oil & gas:

• NOT oil & gas (WAY too broad).
• NOT downstream oil & gas (still too broad: downstream very different from upstream)
• NOT Field Service (varies by industry: oil & gas vs GeekSquad as extreme examples)

Vibe coding in action

Here is an example from Salesforce’s Dreamforce keynote. The demo of Agentforce Vibes by Patrick Stokes was impressive. But look at the detail in the spec he provides to Agentforce Vibes in this video. That is in addition to all the metadata (configuration structure) that Agentforce knows about the Salesforce Org. This link takes you to the vibe coding demo portion in the keynote.

But what else should you provide as background to make the vibe coding even more effective? Agentforce doesn’t know about all the metadata relationships: where used and how they are used. Only products like Elements.cloud have this analysis at the level of detail that Agentforce Vibes requires.

What about the business process that is going to be supported by the app that is going to be vibe-coded? Again, the last 20 years of Business Process Management has taught us that “a picture paints a thousand words”. So a business process diagram could support the specification and give it a lot more clarity. Elements AI can draw that for you from a prompt and you can fine-tune it in collaboration with your users.

Doh!! Can’t I just chat?

“Can’t I just chat to the vibe coding app and it will iterate to what I want?” Sure. But how long have you got? 10 minutes spent thinking about the spec will save hours of iteration. Think about the painful back-and-forth discussions with your developers to get what you want. They have institutional knowledge that an agent doesn’t really have. So that iteration could take 5x longer. It is the whole “shift left” concept, but on steroids.

Shift Left: In simple terms, it is the process of early analysis or validation, which means we shift the identification of a problem left i.e. earlier in the plan. There are numerous studies showing the financial benefits of Shift Left. It is 100x cheaper to fix an issue in analysis than in production. Here is a longer (pre-AI) blog discussion about ‘Shift Left.’

Final word

Vibe coding is definitely the future. It has always been more effective to spend time on getting the requirements and specifications correct before you start coding. Vibe coding is making that even more critical.