Spec Driven Development: Our way
AI-assisted development evolves very fast and it's hard to tell which things are here to stay and which will disappear or be absorbed by other tools, but it seems like Spec-Driven Development (SDD) is a way of working that's here to stay. Many will say, and we include ourselves, that this should have been the way of working from the start.
The funny thing is that, like many other things such as tmux or git worktrees, SDD is not new — the shift in how we work driven by AI has simply made it more popular.
In fact, the origins go back to the 60s and NASA's Project Mercury, with a consolidated culture of very strict upfront requirements, checklists, and pre-verifications for mission-critical software/hardware.1
For those who've spent the last year living under a rock and haven't heard of it, Spec-Driven Development typically follows 4 steps:
- Create the specifications
- Plan how they will be implemented
- Break the work into tasks
- Work on the tasks
In the previous post we mentioned the SKILL /workflow:create-story as our first step for creating tasks. We keep testing and iterating, but for now, in this blog, we're going to tell you about the current state of things.