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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