If you don't have some kind of specification, how are you going to control what you get? It's true that you can turn to a teammate and say "hey, can you write

If you don't have some kind of specification, how are you going to control what you get? It's true that you can turn to a teammate and say "hey, can you write me a pipeline to import data from JSON files?" and you'll usually get something usable. However, you and your teammates have shared goals and background information about your particular project and the world at large, etc. Projects go off the rails all the time because the generally intelligent (allegedly, anyway) humans don't share these things. Right now, the front page has an article called "Offshoring roulette" about this. If you don't want to click through, here's my story about a contract programmer working in the lab. I asked him to look into a problem: the software running our experiments crashed after a certain number of events occurred. It turned out that the events were being written into a fixed-size buffer, which was overflowing. This could have been fixed in many ways (flush it to disk more often, record events in groups, resize the buffer). However, he chose to make the entire saving function into a no-op. This quickly "fixed" the problem--but imagine my delight when the next few runs contained no data whatsoever. In retrospect, although this guy had a PhD, he wasn't particularly interested in the broader context, namely that it crashed while collecting data that I wanted. An optimizer is going to take all kinds of crazy shortcuts like that unless it's somehow constrained by the spec. You could certainly imagine building lots of "do-what-I-mean" constraints into this optimizer but that requires even more magic.