4 posts
Specs copy-paste the product on every increment, and coding agents paraphrase business rules into forks nobody decided. The fix is the same fix we applied to code decades ago: define the rule once, canonically, and make every spec cite it.
A real app shipped two different models of the same tax form. The strange part: its own spec folder both forbids and requires the same service, in one file. I replayed that mistake with Product Definition as Code in place to see if it would get caught. Here is what happened.
Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki and Product Definition as Code share a substrate: persistent, Git-backed, agent-friendly Markdown. But they establish fundamentally different contracts around truth, authority, semantics, and delivery. This article takes the comparison seriously.
AI-assisted delivery is probabilistic, but product boundaries do not have to be. Product Definition as Code provides a bounded product ontology before the backlog and the spec, while keeping runtime enforcement where it belongs: in the software.