Who is all this content for?

I’m in a large conference room at Microsoft China and we are having a team meeting, about 60 of us in total. A very well-known and respected Program Manager from headquarters was giving a talk on writing specification documents. As someone relatively new to program management, I was kind of anti-spec. I believed in code and working systems over words. Then the headquarters PM turned my perspective 180 degrees. He said the act of clearly expressing ideas means you really need to understand those ideas yourself. That expression and understanding of ideas was the true value of specs. That if you couldn’t articulate the concept, then you probably didn’t really understand it.

Before that time, when I was a developer, I used to write specs. It was simultaneously the most frustrating part of the job and the most rewarding. Frustrating for the process of clearly expressing concepts with words. Rewarding for having produced something concrete.

As a developer, I lived in the code, in the system, and a spec was a way to communicate to others who lived outside the system. I often wrote design documents on behalf of an audience that didn’t really want to understand the design. They mainly wanted to know that I did. In those cases, I would often get feedback on structure and not substance.

As a program manager, my job was to communicate to those who lived in the system what they should build and to communicate with various stakeholders on what we were building. A core part of the job was getting feedback from people who were stakeholders but didn’t have the time or inclination to provide it.

It wasn’t until that day in the conference room, listening to that headquarters PM, that I realized the spec process is also for me. Maybe even primarily for me.

What does this have to do with AI?

Well, AI can easily write specs for a concept and produce the entire artifact it describes. There is no need for me to struggle over word choice and concepts. I just look at the resulting artifact, often apps, and give feedback to the AI on that.

This is in contrast to all the documents I wrote during my career and the struggle to get people to read the document, not to mention provide constructive feedback. I accepted that part of my job was to get the feedback I needed.

One technique to get around the limited human attention and interest was to have “spec” days where in groups, we would look at a set of designs. The design set typically covered a product milestone. Later, it became a trend to write documents instead of discussions or decks - a trend we inherited from Amazon employees. Many really good design documents and discussions resulted. Yet, there was always a slew of documents and ideas that did not get the requisite time. Maybe the idea wasn’t as good. Maybe the writer wasn’t as good. Maybe we just didn’t have the time.

And now with AI, does it matter?

With AI, I can create endless documents, apps, images, and all kinds of artifacts. And they can be high quality and tailored for the audience that will consume it. Need a design doc for a systems engineer - done. Need one for marketing based on the same idea - done. Need an app just for you - done. And so on. This is a tremendous boon to productivity.

But I keep coming back to who will consume all this content?

With AI, I can ask for a design document and have one ready to review moments later. I do this all the time for my little side app projects. But I hardly read the design. I review it directionally to make sure it’s going in the right direction and then I just have it build the code. The built app becomes what I review and then I ask AI to update the design document. And I wonder if I’m needed in the feedback loop at all.

The obvious answer is AI will consume the AI content. It will read the spec it wrote, iterate on it, and then generate the app/system. Other AIs will use the system, providing explicit or implicit feedback that the AI will incorporate. Recursive self improvement - maybe. At some point, the AIs will communicate without words.

A deeper question: Is there something fundamentally lost in outsourcing content creation to AI? I think yes, at least partially. It is rewarding to struggle with a concept and like that headquarters PM said, use words to clearly express a concept. He said it was fundamental. I think it is, even now in the age of AI. The struggle, the understanding, if not for others then at least for yourself. Writing is human. As part of the struggle for understanding.

When I share this post, it will get maybe 10 human views and 100 bot views.