Verified Spec-Driven Development (VSDD)

Post by stingraycharles » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 1:12 AM UTC

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #21

LLM-assisted development feels a lot like trend-driven development. When dealing with technique and heterogenous prompts and goals, it’s easy to gain somewhat of a gambler’s fallacy with respect to a particular technique. Spec-driven development feels pretty questionable to me. I’m sure it works fine for feature work that is predictable or has been done before, but then I wonder why you’d waste your time with it. Pri…

Post by NamlchakKhandro » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 1:57 AM UTC

ErrantX wrote: post #67

manmal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Waterfall never worked for a reason. Humans and agents both need to develop a first draft, then re-evaluate with the lessons learned and the structure that has evolved. It’s very very time consuming to plan a complex, working system up front. NASA has done it, for the moon landing. But we don’t have those resources, so we plan, build, evaluate, and repeat.

So, rollback and try again with the insight. AI makes it cheap to implement complex first drafts and iterations. I'm building a CRM system for my business; first time it took about 2 weeks to get a working prototype. V4 from scratch took about 5 hours.

Post by rsrsrs86 » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 3:06 AM UTC

jFriedensreich wrote: post #62

Its an interesting direction if you see it under the umbrella of diminishing costs: You build a product once with vibe coding and a design/ product hat. Once you know what works you rebuild it 100% in a framework like this. You do this every time from scratch when the tech debt or the mismatch between architecture and needs are too big.

Post by nojito » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 3:07 AM UTC

virgilp wrote: post #15

_pdp_ wrote: post #6

Everything in this post stems from the assumption that you already know what you're doing, which is probably true for things you've built before. But I hope we can agree that you can't spec out something you have no clue how to build, let alone write the tests before you've even explored the boundaries of the problem space. That's completely unreasonable. My second point is that this approach is fundamentally wrong f…

Nothing of what you write here matches my experience with AI. Specification is worth writing (and spending a lot more time on than implementation) because it's the part that you can still control, fully read, understand etc. Once it gets into the code, reviewing it will be a lot harder, and if you insist on reviewing everything it'll slow things down to your speed. > If the cost of writing code is approaching zero, t…

Post by virgil_disgr4ce » Sun, Mar 01, 2026, 3:14 AM UTC

manmal wrote: post #54

virgilp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing of what you write here matches my experience with AI. Specification is worth writing (and spending a lot more time on than implementation) because it's the part that you can still control, fully read, understand etc. Once it gets into the code, reviewing it will be a lot harder, and if you insist on reviewing everything it'll slow things down to your speed. > If the cost of writing code is approaching zero, t…

This. Waterfall never worked for a reason. Humans and agents both need to develop a first draft, then re-evaluate with the lessons learned and the structure that has evolved. It’s very very time consuming to plan a complex, working system up front. NASA has done it, for the moon landing. But we don’t have those resources, so we plan, build, evaluate, and repeat.