Spec-Driven Development: When the Brief Becomes the Product
There’s a moment in every developer’s career when you realize the code is not the product. The product is the decision. For the last five years, I’ve watched this shift accelerate with AI. And it’s forcing us to confront something uncomfortable: the quality of what we build is almost entirely determined by the clarity of what we asked for. The Specification Was Always the Bottleneck In traditional software development, we treated the specification as a precondition to building. You write the spec. The engineers read it, find all the places where it’s ambiguous or incomplete, iterate back, and then they build. ...