Specificational coding is the practice of describing desired software behavior in a human-readable specification and using that specification to guide implementation by a person or generative AI system. The specification is iteratively refined as generated code is tested, reviewed, and improved.
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.