One post tagged with "spec-driven-development"

AI agents can generate hundreds of lines of correct, well-tested code. They cannot tell you whether it's the right code — and vibe coding is quietly accumulating the kind of reliability debt you won't see until an incident.

I spent a lot of months during 2025 doing what most engineers were doing: throwing prompts at Claude or Windsurf's Cascade, reviewing the output, tweaking, repeating. It felt productive. Until the day I tried to add a feature to a codebase I'd largely handed off to AI agents, and realized I had no real mental model of what had been built. The code was clean. The tests passed. But I couldn't confidently explain why it worked the way it did — and as someone responsible for reliability at scale, that's not a position I can afford to be in.

That experience pushed me toward spec-driven development (SDD), and it's genuinely changed how I work with AI agents. This post is my attempt to document what I've learned — the what, the why, and a real example of how I've applied it.