An opinion piece arguing against the trend of pushing more decision-making earlier (shift-left) in AI-assisted development through formal specs like Gherkin, Quint, or Alloy. The author contends that judgment is cheaper and more reliable when exercised on a working artifact rather than on paper, proposing a 'shift-right' approach: converse with AI to clarify intent, build quickly, decide by observing the real thing, then lock decisions into machine-readable specs afterward to prevent drift. Irreversible decisions (data deletion, billing, auth, public API/database structure) should still be decided upfront, while reversible ones (UI, wording) can be deferred using feature flags. References critiques of spec-driven development as 'the waterfall strikes back' from Thoughtworks and Marmelab writers.
