The Spec is the Code

TL;DR: As AI commoditizes code, competitive advantage moves upstream—to those who can translate business insight into expertly architected specifications.

A top engineer recently told me, "the spec is the code."

It really hit me, because as I thought about it I realized that he’s right. The future of engineering isn’t in hand-crafting code, but in converting strategic insight into technical blueprints that AI can execute instantly. This isn’t theoretical; elite teams are already working this way - replacing intuition-driven vibe coding with precision and velocity.

The business shift is profound: If the spec is the code, your library of specs becomes a product factory. While competitors build one product at a time, you build the system that builds them on demand. More importantly, each spec embeds your business intelligence into the architecture, shifting advantage upstream - from delivery to strategy.

This creates durable potential advantages:

• Higher-Fidelity Experimentation: Allows you to test fundamental business assumptions by iterating on the insight and its blueprint, rather than getting bogged down in costly code changes. Iterate - fast and often.
• Compound Intellectual Property: Your advantage is no longer just a codebase. It's an ever-growing library of strategic insights paired with proven architectural patterns, allowing you to enter new markets and build new
  products with compounding speed and accuracy.
• The Ultimate Moat: Competitors can try to copy your features (the code), but they cannot copy the unique business insight and architectural wisdom that led to it. You're competing on the quality of your thinking, not the speed of your typing.

Practically, this means we must invest in the talent required to discover insights and translate them into high-quality specifications. This is the human-led, AI-accelerated model for winning the next decade, and it is fast, context-heavy, and talent-led.

From Josh Klein's AI Newsletter