Personally it's well-defined and agentic - just not circulated.
/understand - agents interrogate the problem
/huddle - Thinking panel turns it into a PRD - attacks the premise, PRDs regularly die here
/tm - claude-task-master breaks the survivor into a dependency graph
Nobody writes this half up because "agent talked me out of building it" demos worse than "agent built it".
I’ve had similar feelings how can I trust this if I no longer write the code directly.
I wrote an /assess tool. I designed it to be token light but assesses on everything I could do to regain trust and help AI to improve my code base not by add features but by adding discipline.
This is an opportune moment for me to add a story about my dad. He once asked me, "Do you use Facebook?" I don't use Facebook. My colleague Jeff once sent me an invite whether he would like to be my "friend" on Facebook. I had Jeff's email address, and so I emailed him and I said, "Look Jeff, we're business partners. I send you invoices; you pay me. That is the extent of our relationship. I do not want to be your friend on Facebook." He looked at me and then continued and said, "Jeff never replied to apologise."
Economist magazine editor once said in an interview that Republican/conservative are open regulations for businesses and closed on people. Labour/democrats are tight on business and more welcoming to the people.
Economist editorial attempts to be open on both sides.
I contribute to an open source spec based project management tool. I spend about a day back and forth iterating on a spec, using ai to refine the spec itself. Sometimes feeding it in and out of Claude/gemini telling each other where the feedback has come from. The spec is the value. Using the ai pm tool I break it down into n tasks and sub tasks and dependencies. I then trigger Claude in teams mode to accomplish the project. It can be left alone over night. I wake up in the morning with n prs merged.
Fair point on the "ended debate" phrasing - that was imprecise on my part. What I should have said is "the Swedish study provides the strongest evidence to date and shifts the burden of proof."
It's not actually a single study though. The pattern is consistent across study quality levels:
Population studies (many): Small associations, but can't control for confounding
Negative control studies (several): Associations weaken when using better controls
Sibling studies (multiple, including Swedish): Associations disappear entirely
Meanwhile, fever studies (dozens): Consistent risk signals across different populations
The Swedish study is just the largest and best-designed in a hierarchy of evidence that all points the same direction. When you see this "dose-response by study quality" pattern - where better methodology consistently yields weaker effects - it's usually a strong signal that the original association was artifactual.
The Economist piece published yesterday reinforces this. They mention the NIH study of 200,000 children that "found no link at all" - that's another high-quality study reaching the same conclusion. Meanwhile, the studies showing associations (Nurses' Health Study II, Boston Birth Cohort) are exactly the type of population studies that can't control for the fever/infection confounding.
Science is never "settled" in an absolute sense, but the weight of evidence here is pretty clear. We're not waiting for more acetaminophen studies - we're ignoring the ones we already have while making policy based on weaker evidence.
That's the real problem with the current policy shift.
The political circus is drowning out some pretty clear science here. Let me break this down without the academic jargon:
The basic problem: Most studies can't tell the difference between the medicine and why you're taking it. If you're having Tylenol during pregnancy, it's probably because you have a fever, infection, or severe pain. Guess what also increases autism risk? Fever, infections, and severe illness.
What makes the Swedish study special: They compared siblings in the same family. Same genes, same environment, same parents - but one child was exposed to acetaminophen in the womb and the other wasn't. This controls for all the family-level stuff that usually confuses these studies.
The numbers tell the story:
- Regular studies: "5% increased autism risk with acetaminophen" (HR 1.05)
- Swedish sibling comparison: "Actually, no increased risk" (HR 0.98, could be 7% protective to 4% harmful - basically noise)
- Meanwhile, untreated fever: 40% increased risk, multiple fevers: 212% increased risk
We have evidence that fever during pregnancy messes with fetal brain development. We have the best study ever done showing acetaminophen doesn't cause autism. So we're going to... stop treating the fever?
It's like refusing to use a fire extinguisher because you're worried it might stain your carpet, while your house burns down.
The Swedish study should have ended this debate. When the science is done correctly, the acetaminophen "risk" vanishes completely.
This mirrors exactly what we learned from outsourcing over the past two decades. The successful teams weren’t those with the best offshore developers - they were the ones who mastered writing unambiguous specifications.
AI coding has the same bottleneck: specification quality. The difference is that with outsourcing, poor specs meant waiting weeks for the wrong thing. With AI, poor specs mean iterating indefinitely on the wrong thing.
The irony is that AI is excellent at helping refine specifications - identifying ambiguities, expanding requirements, removing assumptions. The specification effectively IS the code, just in human language instead of syntax.
Teams that struggled with distributed development are repeating the same mistakes with AI. Those who learned specification discipline are thriving because they understand that clear requirements determine quality output, regardless of the implementer.
The primary goal of software design should be to facilitate understanding and modification for future developers, emphasizing the importance of code readability.