Dispatches from O'Reilly: The right amount of spec for agentic development
When code gets cheap, the hard part is deciding what “correct” means and building a reliable way to check it.

When code gets cheap, the hard part is deciding what “correct” means and building a reliable way to check it.

Your semantic layer is a risk mitigation strategy. Not risk in the abstract, compliance-framework sense, but the practical, operational risk that quietly drains organizations every day.

The tools themselves are new and their capabilities are in constant flux. If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. But it also points to a flaw in how you use that tool, the process around it, and the way the tool reinforces the process.
