The New Code — Sean Grove, OpenAI

In an era where AI transforms software development, the most valuable skill isn't writing code - it's communicating intent with precision. This talk reveals how specifications, not prompts or code, are becoming the fundamental unit of programming, and why spec-writing is the new superpower. Drawing from production experience, we demonstrate how rigorous, versioned specifications serve as the source of truth that compiles to documentation, evaluations, model behaviors, and maybe even code. Just as the US Constitution acts as a versioned spec with judicial review as its grader, AI systems need executable specifications that align both human teams and machine intelligence. We'll look at OpenAI's Model Spec as a real-world example. Finally, we'll end on some open questions about what the future of developer tooling looks like in a world where communication once again becomes the most important artifact in engineering. About Sean Grove Sean Grove works on alignment reasoning at OpenAI, helping translate high‑level intent into enforceable specs and evaluations. Before OpenAI he founded OneGraph, a GraphQL developer‑tools startup later acquired by Netlify. He has delivered dozens of technical talks worldwide on developer tooling, APIs, AI UX and design, and now alignment. Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter --- Watch along with the corrected transcript, summary, timestamps and resources on this talk's official AIE page: https://ai.engineer/talks/8rABwKRsec4-specifications-are-the-new-code Join our upcoming AI Engineer conferences (see https://ai.engineer landing page): - AIE New York, October 12–14 — the first AI Engineer Finance mainstage summit - AIEi Shanghai, November 5–6 — the first for meeting top Chinese labs and engineers - AIE CODE in SF, November 10–12 — the top AI Coding conference returns - AIEi Sydney, December 7–8 — the first AIEi run alongside NeurIPS 2026 in Sydney ---