I have the same bias as the parent. I'd rather pay $50 one time than $9 a year even if I throw it away after 4 years.
But the main reason I wouldn't install it despite being happy customizing linux is that it's yet another black box I need to trust and that knows way too much. It's really insane how much you need to compromise your security on macos to have a decent developer experience.
To be fair, I can do 3 balls effortlessly, but I can't do 1 ball like it is in this description, I just have a lot of error correction, enough to do it pretty much indefinitely. But I cannot reliably throw it accurately to the other hand.
You just convinced me to try it. Claude just copy pastes, does search and replace, zero abstractions and I'm the one that needs to think about the edge cases.
You may think that's a good thing but it's not. Codex is great at coming up with solutions to problems that don't exist and failing to find solution to problems that do. In the end you have 300 new lines of code and nothing to show for it.
I'm adding two extra gpus to my local rig. Turns out qwen 3.5 122b is already enough to handle (finish with moderate guidance) non-planning parts of my tasks.
Hey, you seem to have similar view on this. I know ideas are cheap but hear me out:
You talk with agent A it only modifies this spec, you still chat and can say "make it prettier" but that agent only modifies the spec, the spec could also separate "explicit" from "inferred".
And of course agent B which builds only sees the spec.
User actually can care about diffs generated by agent A again, because nobody wants to verify diffs on agents generated code full of repetition and created by search and replace. I believe if somebody implements this right it will be the way things are done.
And of course with better models spec can be used to actually meaningfully improve the product.
Long story short what industry misses currently and what you seem to be understanding is that intent is sacred. It should be always stored, preferably verbatim and always with relevant context ("yes exactly" is obviously not enough). Current generation of LLMs can already handle all that. It would mean like 2-3x cost but seem so much worth it (and the cost on the long run could likely go below 1x given typical workflows and repetitions)
Right, the spec/build separation is exactly the idea and Ossature is already built that way on the build side.
I agree a dedicated layer for intent capture makes a lot of sense. I thought about that as well, I am just not fully convinced it has to be conversational (or free-form conversational). Writing a prompt to get the right spec change is still a skill in itself, and it feels like it'd just be shifting the problem upstream rather than actually solving it. A structured editing experience over specs feels like it'd be more tractable to me. But the explicit vs inferred distinction you mention is interesting and worth thinking through more.
It's just that we're lazy. After being able to chat, I don't see people going back. You can't just paste some error into the specs, you can't paste it image and say it make it look more like this. Plus however well designed the spec, something like "actually make it always wait for the user feedback" can trigger changes in many places (even for the sake of removing contradictions).
1. You can write a spec that builds something that is not what you actually wanted
2. You can write spec that is incoherent with itself or with the external world
3. You can write a spec that doesn't have sufficient mechanical sympathy with the tooling you have and so it requires you to all spec out more and more of the surrounding tech than you practically can.
All of those issues can be addressed by iterating on the spec with the help of agents. It's just an engineering practice, one that we have to become better at understanding
All three of these are real. The audit pass in Ossature is meant to catch the first two before generation starts, it reads across all specs and flags underspecified behavior, missing details, and contradictions. You resolve those, update the specs, and re-audit until the plan is clean. It's not perfect but it shifts a lot of the discovery earlier in the process.
The third point is harder. You still need to know your tooling well enough to write a spec that works with it. That part hasn't gone away.
Program defines the exact computer instructions. Most of the time you don't care about that level of detail. You just have some intent and some constraints.
Say "I want HN client for mobile", "must notify me about comments", you see it and you add "should support dark mode". Can you see how that is much less than anything in any programming language?
My own approach also has intent sitting at the top: intent justifies plan justifies code justifies tests. And the other way around, tests satisfy code, satisfy plan, satisfy intent. These threads bottom up and top down are validated by judge agents.
I also make individual tasks md files (task.md) which makes them capable of carrying intent, plan, but not just checkbox driven "- [ ]" gates, they get annotated with outcomes, and become a workbook after execution. The same task.md is seen twice by judge agents which run without extra context, the plan judge and the implementation judge.
I ran tests to see which component of my harness contributes the most and it came out that it is the judges. Apparently claude code can solve a task with or without a task file just as well, but the existence of this task file makes plans and work more auditable, and not just for bugs, but for intent follow.
Coming back to user intent, I have a post user message hook that writes user messages to a project scoped chat_log.md file, which means all user messages are preserved (user text << agent text, it is efficient), when we start a new task the chat log is checked to see if intent was properly captured. I also use it to recover context across sessions and remember what we did last.
Once every 10-20 tasks I run a retrospective task that inspects all task.md files since last retro and judges how the harness performs and project goes. This can detect things not apparent in task level work, for example when using multiple tasks to implement a more complex feature, or when a subsystem is touched by multiple tasks. I think reflection is the one place where the harness itself and how we use it can be refined.
claude plugin marketplace add horiacristescu/claude-playbook-plugin
source at https://github.com/horiacristescu/claude-playbook-plugin/tree/main
The hierarchy you describe (intent -> plan -> code -> tests) maps well to how Ossature works. The difference is that your approach builds scaffolding around Claude Code to recover structure that chat naturally loses, whereas Ossature takes chat out of the generation pipeline entirely. Specs are the source of truth before anything is generated, so there's no drift to compensate for, the audit and build plan handle that upfront.
The judge finding is interesting though. Right now verification during build for each task in Ossature is command-based, compile, tests, that kind of thing. A judge checking spec-to-code fidelity rather than (or maybe in addition to?) runtime correctness is worth thinking about.
Yes, judges should not just look for bugs, they should also validate intent follow, but that can only happen when intent was preserved. I chose to save the user messages as a compromise, they are probably 10 or 100x smaller than full session. I think tasks themselves are one step lower than pure user intent. Anyway, if you didn't log user messages you can still recover them from session files if they have not been removed.
One interesting data point - I counted word count in my chat messages vs final code and they came out about 1:1, but in reality a programmer would type 10x the final code during development. From a different perspective I found I created 10x more projects since I relied on Claude and my harness than before. So it looks user intent is 10x more effective than manual coding now.
I'm using something similar-ish that I build for myself (much smaller, less interesting, not yet published and with prettier syntax). Something like:
a->b # b must always be true if a is true
a<->b # works both ways
a=>b # when a happens, b must happen
a->fail, a=> fail # a can never be true / can never happen
a # a is always true
So you can write:
Product.alcoholic? Product in Order.lineItems -> Order.customer.can_buy_alcohol?
u1 = User(), u2=User(), u1 in u2.friends -> u2 in u1.friends
new Source() => new Subscription(user=Source.owner, source=Source)
Source.subscriptions.count>0 # delete otherwise
This is a much more compact way to write desired system properties than writing them out in English (or Allium), but helps you reason better about what you actually want.
Allium looks interesting, making behavioral intent explicit in a structured format rather than prose is very close to what I'm trying to do with Ossature actually.
Ossature uses two markdown formats, SMD[1] for describing behavior and AMD for structure (components, file paths, data models). AMDs[2] link back to their parent SMD so behavior and structure stay connected. Both are meant to be written, reviewed, and/or owned by humans, the LLM only reads the relevant parts during generation. One thing I am thinking about for the future is making the template structure for this customizable per project, because "spec" means different things to different teams/projects. Right now the format is fixed, but I am thinking about a schema-based way to declare which sections are required, their order, and basic content constraints, so teams can adapt the spec structure to how they think about software without having to learn a grammar language to do it (though maybe peg-based underneath anyway, not sure).
The formal approach you describe is probably more precise for expressing system properties. Would be interesting to see how practical it is to maintain it as a project grows.
It's hard to tell how much it says about difficulty of harnessing vs how much it says about difficulty of maintaining a clean and not bloated codebase when coding with AI.
Why not both? AI writes bloated spaghetti by default. The control plane needs to be human-written and rigid -> at least until the state machine is solid enough to dogfood itself. Then you can safely let the AI enhance the harness from within the sandbox.
I mean, tools change, but I'd be happy to hear if any tool can create that by just saying create "Claude Code Unpack" with nice graphics. or some other single prompt. It likely was an iterative process and it would be lovely if more people started sharing that, because the process itself is also very interesting.
I've created some chinese characters learning website and I took me typing 1/3 of LoTR to get there[1]. I would have typed like 1% of that writing code directly. It is a different process, but it still needs some direction.
But the main reason I wouldn't install it despite being happy customizing linux is that it's yet another black box I need to trust and that knows way too much. It's really insane how much you need to compromise your security on macos to have a decent developer experience.
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