Spec-Driven Development with Claude Code
Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.
From Vibe Coding to Verifiable, Production-Grade AI Development
What you’ll learn and how you can apply it
- Design a feature specification that clearly defines flows, acceptance criteria, and non-functional requirements for AI-assisted development
- Build an end-to-end AI-powered web feature
- Apply a spec → plan → work → review workflow to improve correctness, security, and maintainability
Course description
As AI coding agents become more capable, teams increasingly struggle with misalignment, hidden assumptions, brittle implementations, and repeated rework caused by vague requirements. Harshit Tyagi shows you how to replace ad hoc prompt-driven coding with a repeatable spec-and-test-driven development workflow.
Working with a small CRM application, you’ll take a vague request for lead scoring and turn it into a shared design concept, a lightweight specification, and a dependency-aware backlog of vertical slices. Through a live guided build and short audience exercises, you’ll implement the first end-to-end slice—reply, award points, persist the event, and display and sort by score—using Claude Code and test-driven development.
You’ll then review the implementation in a fresh context, validate it through tests and a runnable demo, turn QA findings into new work, and see how precise specifications enable autonomous and parallel agents to continue the backlog safely.
By the end, you’ll have a practical workflow you can apply to product features, internal tools, APIs, and larger AI-assisted development projects.
This live event is for you because...
- You’re a software developer who’s building or maintaining AI-powered applications.
- You work with product requirements that often get lost or reinterpreted during implementation.
- You want a repeatable workflow for using AI coding tools beyond one-off prompts.
Prerequisites
- Node.js and a package manager installed on your local machine
- A code editor such as VS Code ready for use
- Basic understanding of application architecture (APIs, frontend, persistence)
Schedule
The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.
Section 1 – Foundations: Using Specs to Shape an Application (45 minutes)
- Presentation:Understand the product goals, user flows, and constraints of the application being built
- Recognize the risks of building applications without clear specifications, including misalignment, rework, and brittle features
- Understand how spec-driven development defines intent before implementation and why that changes outcomes
- Discussion:
- Why vague requirements and prompt-driven development break down at scale
- How misalignment shows up in real-world AI-assisted development
- Exercise:Convert a vague product idea into a concrete specification covering user journeys, functional scope, constraints, and explicit non-goals
- Draft an initial design specification that can reliably guide the rest of the application build
- Q&A
Section 2 – The Spec Toolkit: Aligning on the Feature Before Writing Code (30 minutes)
- Presentation:Purpose and structure of core specification documents used to drive an application build
- How to describe application flows, UI,, edge cases, and acceptance criteria
- How to turn long specs into atomic slices of work
- Discussion:Trade-offs between lightweight specs and over-documentation
- What “good enough” specification looks like in practice
- Exercise:Create a complete, usable specification set for a real application feature
- Practice documenting decisions, tracking status, deferred features, and known limitations
- Q&A
Section 3 – The Workflow: Build the Feature Spec by Spec (60 minutes)
- Presentation:Translating written specifications into executable, incremental build plans
- Applying spec-driven development across frontend, backend, and integrations
- Defining “done” through acceptance criteria instead of subjective judgment
- Discussion:Common failure points when specs meet implementation
- How teams drift from intent—and how to detect it early
- Exercise:Break features into small, reviewable units aligned to the specification
- Review implemented features against specs to catch gaps and incorrect assumptions
- Q&A
Section 4 – Code Review, Debugging, Parallel Execution using worktrees,, and Cloud-based Execution (45 minutes)
- Presentation:Validating application behavior using tests, runnable examples, and minimal demos
- Confirming the implementation matches original intent captured in the specs
- Scaling the spec-driven workflow to APIs, internal tools, AI systems, and larger teams
- Discussion:Real-world failure modes in application development
- How specifications reduce context loss across handoffs and interruptions
- Exercise:Apply a repeatable approach for validating, resuming, and evolving applications using specifications as the backbone
- Q&A
Final Wrap-Up & Summary – What We Built and Learned (Integrated across sections)
- Presentation:Summary of the end-to-end spec → plan → work → review workflow
- Key lessons from designing, implementing, and validating an AI-powered application
- How to apply this workflow to participants’ own projects
- Open Q&A
Your Instructor
Harshit Tyagi
Harshit Tyagi is an AI consultant, founder, and educator focused on building AI systems that create real business value. As the founder of Agentwise, he helps teams move beyond prototypes by designing agent systems, automation platforms, and production-grade AI applications that actually ship and scale. He is also the founder of glued.me, a marketing SaaS platform built to automate the full performance marketing stack—from campaigns and creative to bidding and reporting through agent-driven workflows.
Beyond building products, Harshit teaches AI to a global audience through platforms such as LinkedIn Learning, O’Reilly, and YouTube, where he is known for turning complex ideas into clear, practical, example-driven explanations. His work sits at the intersection of AI strategy, product execution, and education, with a strong belief that the best AI is not the kind that looks impressive in a demo, but the kind that improves day-to-day operations and moves real metrics.