A new blog post argues that developers are becoming too dependent on AI assistants — a phenomenon the author calls "AI psychosis" — and that the antidote is writing detailed specifications in YAML.
The piece, published on the acai.sh blog, describes the author's shift toward formally documenting requirements before writing any code. YAML serves as the format because it's machine-readable and forces structure: indentation rules mean malformed specs are immediately obvious, unlike prose that can hide ambiguities.
The argument isn't that AI tools are bad. It's that skipping the spec-writing step — letting an LLM generate code from a vague prompt — trains developers to be fuzzy thinkers. When something breaks, there's no ground truth to debug against. The spec becomes the contract.
This resonates with a broader debate in software engineering about whether AI accelerates debugging or just makes code more opaque. Stack Overflow's 2024 developer survey found that 70% of respondents said they ship AI-generated code they don't fully understand. YAML specs won't fix that, but they at least create a paper trail of intent.
The closing thought: maybe the real value isn't the format. It's the discipline of deciding what you want before you ask for it.