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Agentic Engineering at Scale
book

Agentic Engineering at Scale

by Chris Ford
July 2027
Intermediate
400 pages
3h 46m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Agentic Engineering at Scale

Chapter 2. Spec-Driven Development

When code becomes cheaper, you get a lot more of it. However, code that’s easier to produce isn’t automatically easier to guide to a high-quality outcome. To harness agentic coding at scale, you have to encode your intent so that it’s available to coding agents.

That’s where spec-driven development (SDD) comes in. A specification or spec is a harness that describes qualities that the solution must have. Spec-driven development is a software engineering approach where a spec is the primary artifact from which the implementation flows. Effective spec-driven development is about channeling intent into the code-generation process, suggesting possibilities, and constraining solutions.

Early adopters of spec-driven development with coding agents focused on unstructured Markdown as a way to build specs, but natural language is too imprecise to reliably specify systems at scale on its own. To effectively capture your expectations, your spec should make use of a variety of formats. Spec-driven development includes any kind of artefact ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0642572344306Errata Page