Sean Grove: specifications are the new code
At the AI Engineer World's Fair, OpenAI's Sean Grove argued that the valuable artifact of software is structured intent, not code.
Sean Grove, who works on alignment at OpenAI, argued that code is only a small part of the value engineers produce. Most of it lies in structured communication: understanding the problem, agreeing on goals, and checking the result. As models get better at writing code, he said, specifications become the fundamental unit of programming, and code becomes a lossy projection of the intent behind it.
One slide in the talk named the valuable artifact directly: structured intent. He used OpenAI’s Model Spec, a written specification of how its models should behave, as a working example.
Why it matters for structured intent: this talk gave the discipline its name. Structure Intent builds on it by asking what a structured intent should contain: priorities, origins, evidence and quality, not just requirements.
Source: The New Code, AI Engineer