Today we release CodeSpeak 0.3.1. Please find the full release notes at the end of this post.

One of the core promises of CodeSpeak is "Maintain specs, not code". Application code often contains a lot of tedious details that are obvious to humans. LLMs make these details obvious to machines as well, so that humans can focus on the essence (the business logic, the architecture, the tricky parts of the system, etc).

An important part of this vision is migrating parts of existing projects from the "old world" of code to the "new world" of specs. Maintenance is a lot easier when all you need to do is edit a concise human-readable text instead of much longer code.

For this scenario, CodeSpeak 0.3.1 introduces codespeak takeover. See the full tutorial: Convert Existing Code to Specs.

In the tutorial, we use a real project — microsoft/MarkItDown — and fix issue #1468 by editing the generated spec. The spec change of +23/-3 lines generated +221/-25 lines of code (~10x).

The Road Ahead

We've just started with takeover: the current version gives you a feel of what it can be, but it's only a tiny first step, and needs a lot of improvement.

The aspects we are planning to improve:

• making sure that the spec doesn't miss anything important and doesn't include anything unnecessary,
• making sure that if we delete the code, an equivalent implementation can be generated from the spec (passing all the tests, etc),
• verifying that, when editing the spec, we can generate adequate changes in the code (spec diff -> code diff),
• ideally, also maintaining good test coverage to make sure everything keeps working over time.