Prompt Engineering Is Dead - Long Live Specification Engineering

The Cynical Developer by The Cynical Developer

Aug 31, 202600:06:11Technology

We argue prompt engineering is already on its way out - and what’s replacing it is one of the oldest skills in software. When generating code gets cheap, deciding precisely what to build becomes the whole game. Written b...

Related Episodes

Continue listening to more episodes from The Cynical Developer.

Why Most Companies Are Using AI Completely Wrong

Oct 5, 2026 - 00:06:02

Most companies are doing something with AI — and measuring the wrong thing. We look at the adoption trap,...

The Future Developer Is Closer to a Product Engineer

Sep 28, 2026 - 00:05:52

As building gets cheap, the bottleneck moves from “how” to “what”. We look at the rise of the product-min...

Why AI Is Making Good Engineers More Valuable

Sep 21, 2026 - 00:06:21

A fear runs under a lot of AI conversations: that experienced engineers are worth less now the machine ca...

The Junior Developer Crisis Nobody Is Talking About

Sep 14, 2026 - 00:06:09

If AI writes the boilerplate, tests and CRUD screens juniors used to learn on, how does anyone become sen...

The End of Coding Interviews As We Know Them

Sep 7, 2026 - 00:05:52

The whiteboard puzzle always tested the one mode the job never uses - alone, from memory, no help. We loo...

AI Is Creating Two Kinds of Developers

Aug 24, 2026 - 00:05:52

A quiet split is forming in software teams - not junior versus senior, but developers who’ve learned to w...

Why Your Team Doesn’t Own Anything

Aug 17, 2026 - 00:05:38

We dig into the gap between responsibility and ownership - why so many teams are accountable for outcomes...

Remote Work Didn’t Kill Productivity - Bad Management Did

Aug 10, 2026 - 00:05:47

We take on the tidy story that remote work killed productivity. It didn’t - it removed the things that we...