8 AI Revisions, Still Wrong

Last Wednesday afternoon, at a cafe by Green Lake in Kunming, I watched ChatGPT generate the wrong landing page for the fifth time and almost spilled my coffee all over the keyboard.

I also got stuck here—before, I just told AI "make me a client management page," revised it 8 times, and it was still wrong, wasting the entire afternoon. Later I realized it wasn't that AI was dumb; I just hadn't figured out what I wanted myself.

Write the Spec First, Then Let AI Work

San Francisco indie dev acai gets to the office every morning and spends 20 minutes writing a YAML spec before letting AI generate code. He calls it "AI psychosis"—getting your hands on AI and just telling it to work, revising over and over, getting messier each time. The fix is to write the requirements clearly before opening your mouth.

Don't be scared of YAML; it's just a text format that both humans and machines can read, like filling out a form:

name: Client Management Tool
features:
 - Add client info
 - One-click export to Excel
 - Filter by tags

List out what you want, what you don't want, and what it should look like, one by one. Then feed this spec to AI, and AI has a "blueprint" instead of guessing blindly. Later, I spent 20 minutes writing a spec first, and AI got it 80% right on the first try.

You Can Replicate This Today

💰 Cost: $0 (YAML is just plain text, you can write it in any editor)

⏱ Time: About 30 minutes for your first spec

🔧 Tech barrier: If you can type in Notepad, you can do this

👉 First step: Open your computer's Notepad, and on the first line type name: Your project name

Advice by Stage

If you're just starting out and haven't used AI to build anything yet: It's fine not to try this now; come back when you have a concrete project to launch. Just remember the principle of "think clearly before you act."

If you have 1-2 clients and occasionally have AI help write copy or build small tools: I'd suggest spending 15 minutes writing your requirements in this form format before you start next time. You'll notice the number of back-and-forth revisions drop significantly.

If you're scaling up and your team relies on AI for efficiency: specs are your collaboration infrastructure. I'd suggest turning the spec into an internal template and filling one out before every project starts. This works better than any project management tool.