Incomplete Developer

Posted on Mar 2

In this ERA of AI Coding - Learn the Different methods of Specs/Prompts

#ai #coding #learning #productivity

And learn this fast....because this is now the new PRODUCTIVITY SKILL.

Think back to technical interviews between 2010 and 2018.

If you were a .NET developer going into a second-round interview, chances are you’d be asked to build a simple application:

A 2-table CRUD system
ASP.NET MVC front-end
Entity Framework for data access

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AI Coding is Dominating — The One Skill Every Developer Must Master

If you could build that under pressure, you proved you could code.

Fast forward to today — and things have changed dramatically.

With tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and assistants such as GitHub Copilot, someone who isn’t even a professional developer can generate convincing code.

This is often called vibe coding — prompting AI and letting it produce code rapidly.

But real-world systems are much more complex than a 2-table CRUD app.

And that’s where the modern developer skill comes in.

The New Developer Skill: Managing AI

Low-level code generation is quickly becoming AI’s specialty.

The developer’s role is quietly shifting toward something different:

Managing AI coding agents effectively.

In practical terms, that means getting very good at writing clear specifications for AI.

This can include:

Effective prompts for vibe coding
Structured instructions.md files
Full spec-driven development

The real skill is knowing when each approach is appropriate.

A Modern Take on the Classic Coding Test

I recently recreated the classic developer interview exercise — but with a modern twist.

Instead of writing the code myself, I used AI to generate it.

My job wasn’t coding.

My job was writing the instructions.md file that the AI would follow.

I used ChatGPT to help draft the instructions and executed them through an AI coding agent in Visual Studio Code.

Writing the instructions took about an hour — longer than vibe coding.

But the payoff came during execution.

The AI generated code that was:

Structurally correct
Architecturally consistent
Almost perfect on the first run

Total time spent: about 3 hours.

The Real Takeaway

Modern development now sits on a spectrum:

Vibe Coding → fast experimentation
Structured instructions → most real projects
Spec-driven development → complex systems

The key skill today is knowing when to use each one.

The future developer isn’t just someone who writes code.

It’s someone who can direct AI to build the right system efficiently.

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