11 posts
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.
In April I published one week of SDD production numbers. The same data trail rerun for June 1 through 10 shows the velocity curve: 309 PRs opened, 293 merged, about 185 production deploys, and one footnote about outrunning GitHub Actions…
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.
The previous two posts made claims. Here is what a week of the workflow looks like as a data trail, PRs, deploys, CI runs, specs merged, pulled from GitHub.
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.