Where the spec comes from

1. Building a page is only half the battle

Tommy sits down to the landing page in a fighting mood. In his head, it’s a simple picture: yesterday the agent built a clicker from a single sentence — which means if he says, “make a landing page,” it’ll take off. He goes to Alex confident, like, let’s throw it together quickly. But Alex, instead of jumping in to write the spec, starts asking boring questions.

“Okay, landing page. For what? What product is it for?”

“Well… some product. Tony said it was for one specific one.”

“Which one exactly? Who are we selling to — young people, businesses, grandmas? What’s on the main screen, the first thing a person will see when they land? What’s the button, where does it lead — to buy, to leave a request, to call? What tone — strict, playful, premium?”

Tommy opens his mouth — and closes it. By the third question he’s already stalling, and after that he has nothing to say at all. He came in convinced that the main skill was making an AI agent build a page, and apparently he can do that. But it turns out that isn’t the main thing.

“See?” Alex isn’t gloating, just calm. “Building a page is only half the battle, and not even the harder half. The hard part is knowing WHAT should be on it. What product it is, who it’s for, what to put front and center, what voice to use. The skeleton — the header, the blocks, the button — I can sketch in a minute, no big deal. But the flesh, the living meaning for which the whole page exists — that isn’t in the code at all. It’s in people’s heads.”

“And where is this meaning?” Tommy already knows the answer, and he doesn’t like it. “With the client I haven’t even seen. And with Tony, who won’t pick up the phone. Probably at yet another meeting.”

“Exactly. Until you pull the data from there, the agent has nothing to build. Just an empty shell.”

2. Questions as a working tool

Tommy isn’t good at panicking — for situations like this he’s long had his own tactic ready. He likes asking questions. While you’re asking questions, you haven’t disappeared yet, you’re still in the game; you’re thinking out loud, getting smarter at someone else’s expense, and from the outside you don’t look like a clueless rookie, but like a thorough intern who actually cares.

So instead of making up answers out of thin air, he decided to go to Tony every time questions came up. And ask real things — about the product, about the tone, about what matters to the client.

On the third round, Tony smirks:

“You’ve been dropping by a lot.”

Another person would have gotten flustered — like, I’m bothering a busy guy. Tommy, though, instantly turns it to his advantage, with the most winning smile:

“Why guess at all?” He shrugs as if he’s doing Tony a favor. “You’re the only one here who knows everything about this product, so it’d be a sin not to ask. I’m not pulling it out of thin air; I’m being smart — straight from the source. Better than making it up myself and then redoing it. And you won’t have to blush, either.”

And it works. Tony, instead of brushing off the annoying intern, gets caught on “the one who knows everything” — and answers more willingly. Tommy makes a mental note: softened. His favorite magic isn’t code, but this: making it so people want to help you.

And then comes what he didn’t expect. Tony doesn’t answer everything right away. For some parts he frowns: “wait, I’ll check with the client” — and goes to check. Tony. The guy who’s in charge here and whom Tommy is a little afraid of.

“Listen,” Tommy says, even slowing down, “does nobody here actually know everything, right? Everyone just knows whom to poke.”

“Yep,” Tony grunts, not arguing.

And right there, something inside Tommy lets go. He thought normal work was a room full of smart people who know everything, and he’s the only one forever out of the loop. But it turns out work is a chain of questions: you pass the baton until it reaches the person in the know. The strength isn’t in knowing everything, but in knowing whom to ask. And his favorite question-asking tactic isn’t a weakness at all, but exactly how things are set up here.

Running to Tony with one question at a time is a so-so tactic, though: the guy is busy, and you’re pulling him away five times in one morning. It’s smarter to collect all the gaps at once and come over just once.

3. The framework is quick, the meaning comes from people

Then Tommy pulls off an even sneakier move. He goes to Alex not with “help me build this,” but with a more interesting task.

“Listen. I’m still pulling some details from Tony, but that’s taking forever. And why wait for the framework? We can do that now. So let’s do this: wherever I’m missing an answer, make something reasonable up yourself — something human, not random. And build the first draft on that. I’ll plug in the real answers later.”

In essence, he’s handing Alex not just the assembly, but part of the thinking itself: figure out for me what I don’t know. And he likes himself for it — while another person would honestly have waited for all the answers from Tony, he has already started the work with what he has. He didn’t cheat — he cut a corner where he could.

Alex doesn’t push back. He takes the scraps, fills the gaps with reasonable assumptions — ordinary product, ordinary audience, standard set of blocks — and quickly produces the spec framework: header, a couple of blocks, a button. The meaning holds. He puts the result into a file — TZ_LANDING.md, so it doesn’t live in a chat thread.

Tommy looks at the result — and now sees what Alex had been explaining an hour earlier with questions. The skeleton came together almost instantly; the agent handles structure on the fly. And the hard part isn’t the header or the button. It’s the living meanings that Alex has temporarily plugged with random placeholders; those still have to be replaced with the client’s real answers. The framework is cheap. Meaning is expensive, and you get it from people.

Framework and meaning of a landing page: the agent quickly builds the header, main screen, blocks and button, but what the product is, who we sell to, what people see first, what to put up front, where the button leads and what tone the page takes — only people know; until there is an answer, the framework holds a placeholder, later replaced by the client’s answer The framework is cheap, meaning is expensive Framework the agent builds it fast Meaning comes from people only people know the answers Header Main screen Block Block Button the whole page What’s the product? Who are we selling to? What do they see first? What goes up front? Where does it lead: buy, request, call? What tone: strict, playful, premium? Until there’s an answer, the framework holds a placeholder — later the client’s answer replaces it

And that’s where Tommy loses it. He sends the framework to Tom2036 — as proof of his own genius:

Tommy snorts. Not “well done,” but “you’re not even warmed up yet.” A jab in the style of the perpetually mysterious chat with himself from the future, and that’s it. What “warm-up mode” means — he doesn’t get into it; the idea of connecting it with the morning bike with a rocket strapped to the back crosses his mind, but that’s as far as it goes.

He closes the chat. Time to sum up the first results: the spec got through, Alex is a legend. The main landing page still needs real finishing — and Tommy goes to Oliver with that. Time to move into the IDE and polish the first landing page together with Sam.