Yeah I think people are really underestimating what LLMs can do even without specs.

As an example, I did an exploratory attempt to add custom software over some genuinely awful windows software for a scientific imaging station with a proprietary industrial camera. Five days later Claude and I had figured out how to USB-pcap sample images and it's operationalized and smoothly running for months now. 100% of the code written by Claude, it's all clean (reviewed it myself) pretty much all I did was unstuck it at a few places, "hey based on the file sizes it looks like the images are being sent as a 16-bit format")

For day to day work, I'll often identify a bug, "hey, when I shift click on this graphical component, it's not doing the right thing". I go tell Claude to write a RED (failing) integration test, then make it pass.

Zero lines of code manually written. Only occasionally do I have to intervene and rearchitect. Usually thus involves me writing about ten lines of scaffold code, explaining the architectural concept, and telling it to just go