Requirements Writing Is Now a Core Engineering Skill
For most of software’s history, vague requirements were expensive but survivable. A developer who received an underspecified ticket could ask a question, make a reasonable inference, or build a small prototype and get feedback. The cost of ambiguity was absorbed in back-and-forth, rework, and the gradual clarification that happened naturally when humans were iterating together.
AI-assisted development has changed the economics of ambiguity in a way that most teams have not fully reckoned with. When code generation is fast, underspecified requirements do not produce a small amount of wrong code — they produce a large amount of wrong code, confidently. The system generating the implementation cannot ask a clarifying question, at least not in the way a developer would. It fills the gap with plausible behavior, and plausible is not the same as correct.
The implication is that requirements writing has moved from a project management concern to a core engineering skill. The quality of the prompt or the specification is now directly upstream of the quality of the implementation, with very little human judgment available to compensate for gaps in between.
What good requirements look like in this context has also shifted. The traditional user story format — as a user, I want, so that — was designed to communicate intent and preserve flexibility for implementation decisions. That flexibility is now a liability when the implementation is being generated from the statement. Effective requirements for AI-assisted development are more precise about behavior, more explicit about edge cases, and more specific about what the output should not do as well as what it should.
This is not a reason to abandon user stories or return to waterfall specification. It is a reason to treat the act of writing requirements as the first act of engineering, not an administrative handoff before engineering begins. Teams that develop this muscle will generate less and ship more. Teams that do not will spend their velocity on rework.