specificational coding

The process of writing and maintaining a file in a human language (for example, English) that describes software. You can then tell a generative AI model or another software engineer to create the software that fulfills that description. Automatically-generated code generally requires iteration. In specificational coding, you iterate on the description file. By contrast, in conversational coding, you iterate within the prompt box. In practice, automatic code generation sometimes involves a combination of both specificational coding and conversational coding.

Practitioners refer to specificational coding when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.