Spec-Driven Development from GitHub
Instead of coding first and writing docs later, in spec-driven development, you start with a (you guessed it) spec. This is a contract for how your code should behave and becomes the source of truth your tools and AI agents use to generate, test, and validate code. The result is less guesswork, fewer surprises, and higher-quality code.
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Spec Kit, our new open sourced toolkit for spec-driven development, provides a structured process to bring spec-driven development to your coding agent workflows with tools including GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and Gemini CLI.
GitHub has apparently made a small program to generate templated spec documents, to help with this known style of working with coding agents. They propose a structured approach to developing these spec documents: 1) Specify, 2) Plan, 3) Tasks, 4) Implement, which is supported by the program.
I've taken a look through the agent instructions and I'm a little skeptical of the complexity at play. I like the structuring, and I'm going to do a deeper dive to see what parts I'd like to take. But A) I don't want to install a program for some prompts and B) I've had both good and bad experience with large spec documents — they never cover everything I need them to, and sometimes when they do, the instructions get ignored anyway. With too large of a spec document I worry about poisoning the context with a lot of irrelevant information to the current task at hand, though perhaps breaking the document up into a number of smaller documents as they appear to do would help with this.