In my experience, spending 20β30 minutes writing a good spec results in code that is about 90% close to what I expected, which reduces the back-and-forth with the tool. It also helps me clarify and define with some level of precision what I actually want. During the specification phase, I can iterate until the design proposed by the tool is close to what I envision, reducing the number of surprises when the tool generates code. Itβs not perfect, and there are still details the tool misses that require additional prompts, but overall I can get good results in a single session, whereas before I would exhaust the tokens and need to start a new session again.
My best "AI win" so far was in an area where I had to create a number of things that all followed a similar pattern. I created one hand-crafted example and created a general spec and specific ones for each component. It worked really well and I was, for a moment, experiencing a 10-30X productivity boost while having resultant code that I could review quickly and understand. It was also more consistent that I think I would have gotten from hand coding as it is easy to drift a little in terms of style and decisions.
Of course, this is all very situational and based on the problem being solved at the time. The risk with "practices" is they are generally not concerned with problem being solved and insist on applying the same template regardless.
