Spec-driven development (AI)
A discipline for AI-assisted coding: agree on a written specification of what you’re building before the AI generates code, so the agent implements an agreed plan rather than improvising. Introduced to this wiki by spec-driven-ai-tools.
Why it exists
The motivating claim: AI coding tools deliver speed, but “speed without structure means shipping ambiguity at scale.” A spec is the structure — a reviewable artifact the human approves before implementation, and a reference the implementation can be checked against.
Recurring design elements (across the tools surveyed)
- A source-of-truth spec that the project accumulates (e.g. OpenSpec’s archived delta specs; Spec-Kit’s project-wide “constitution”).
- Explicit handling of unknowns (Spec-Kit’s
NEEDS CLARIFICATIONflags). - Phases (plan → implement) and, in the better tools, course correction and review gates between them.
- Delivery as agent-skills / slash commands installed into the coding agent.
More instances (2026-06-01)
- conductor extends the idea to Context-Driven Development: not just a spec before code but context as a managed, persistent artifact (Context → Spec & Plan → Implement), with a mandatory plan-review gate and git-aware revert by logical work unit.
- BMAD (per claude-code-best-practices) is a spec-driven methodology a practitioner reserves for projects with real users / security surfaces — it surfaced 36 user flows + risks before coding, where lighter “plan mode” missed security issues. Concrete evidence the spec-first discipline pays off where stakes are real.
- spec-kit (GitHub) — the reference SDD toolkit: six
/speckit.*commands (constitution → specify → clarify → plan → tasks → implement), “specs as executable blueprints,” across 30+ agents. The canonical, tool-agnostic instance. - get-shit-done (GSD) — a Claude-Code system pairing context engineering with SDD; shows the discipline converging with conductor‘s “context as artifact” idea.
Connections
Sits alongside claude-financial-services and (cross-wiki) gbrain as another case of capability and process encoded as markdown an agent executes. (Reflexively, it mirrors how this very wiki was built — a brainstorm → spec → plan → execute loop — which is some weak corroboration that the structure-before-code instinct generalizes.)
Related
spec-driven-ai-tools · conductor · claude-code-best-practices · agentic-coding-harness · agent-skills