14 posts
The third post in the SDD numbers series is not about velocity. Since June the platform's effort moved into four quiet systems: an externalized memory, a statistical screen that refuses to flatter me, a point-in-time data floor, and a pr…
The full path to an agent platform that edits its own instructions is already published, scattered across seven articles that never mention each other. I run that architecture as one person: supervisor and worker tiers, verification guar…
First lesson in a series on running an AI-powered software team of one. Before you ask an agent to build, give your project a home for intent: a small directory of numbered specs grown from one template your agent fills in and you approv…
SpecSelf looks like a set of features: coherence checks, persona rotation, review cadences, an audit trail. Every one of them was implied by ten frontmatter fields decided on day one. A life-OS is not a feature list. It is a schema decis…
I built a method as a public repo and the product that runs it as two private ones, and none of them treated the others as a source of truth. The domain enum lived in four places. A persona drifted between its lens file and its API contr…
Three months ago I laid out spec-driven development and the folder architecture that makes it work. Most of the playbook held up in daily production use. Three ideas that essay never mentioned turned out to matter more than anything in i…
Spec-driven development, pointed at a life. Why my principles and goals live as markdown an AI agent reasons over, and the one rule that makes handing an agent your life safe: it can challenge the record, but it never writes it.
I handed a backlog to Claude Fable, told it once it could merge, and let it run. It shipped seventeen items across five repos. The line that mattered was not in the work it finished. It was in the work it refused to touch.
Dumping the whole corpus into an AI agent makes it worse, not better. The fix is architectural: each task loads a curated slice, not everything you have. Here is the method, and the same move at three different layers: specs, sensor data…
Anthropic published a guide on building a session-level orchestration mode. I built it two ways, on the CLI and on the API, and then hit the part the guide does not cover: an orchestrator that fans out is useless without a backlog of rea…
Two weeks after I shipped a post about a scoring engine I'd built, I rewrote the spec it was based on. Here's what I learned, and why I had an AI agent do the literature review.
Spec-driven development reads like a methodology for controlling AI agents. It isn't. It's a methodology for managing context across stateless sessions. The spec is the persistent memory.
Two production sites, a blog, and two personal AI projects, shipped this week from a phone. The chain is voice dictation into Perplexity Computer, a spec, then Claude Code on the web. The interaction model is the story.
Why spec-driven development and structured folder architecture are the missing infrastructure for AI-assisted engineering: methodology, common mistakes, and where to start.