Spec-driven development (1/2)

Part 1: Sweet memory that belonged to the past

When I first heard the term “spec-driven development” over one month ago, I assumed it was what its composing words meant: software development guided by specification. I didn’t look it up further, much less tried it out

On last weekend, I read the “Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl” article by Birgitta Böckeler, I realized I had experimented with it in one form or another.

In this 2-part series, I will retell those attempts and comment on what I found working and not working.

Checkout out part 2 here.

April 2025 — “Ask me one question at a time so we can develop a thorough, step-by-step spec for this idea…”

This was 6 months ago.

I read this blog by Harper Reed and decided to try it out. I suppose that was before vibe-coding became a thing and AI-assisted development was synonymous with AI-assisted code completion and StackOverFlow-like Q&A

Summary of the approach:

• Step 1: Brainstorm with AI to explore and design as many and as detailed product features as possible —example: 00 — LLM.md
• Step 2: ask AI to summarize and convert the conversation into a detailed specification document — example: 01 -specs.md
• Step 3: ask AI to break…