2 posts tagged with "Spec-Driven Development"

On a Friday afternoon, someone on the ops team builds a dashboard in an hour. They describe it to a coding agent, click around, ask for a couple of changes, and share the link. Everyone loves it. On Monday a billing service renames one field, the dashboard quietly shows zero revenue for three regions, and nobody notices until Wednesday, because the only test the dashboard ever had was a person looking at it on Friday.

Nobody did anything wrong. The dashboard was built the right way for a prototype, and then it stopped being a prototype without anyone deciding that it had.

It is Tuesday morning and a product manager is running the company's checkout page on their laptop. Not a mockup of it. The actual app, on localhost, on a branch called proto/split-payments, with seed data loaded. They ask Claude Code to let a customer split an order across two cards. Four minutes later they are clicking through it. The confirmation screen looks wrong when one card is a gift card with a low balance, so they call the designer over, and the two of them fix the layout in the running product while the agent keeps up.

By lunch they have found six edge cases nobody would have written into a requirements document, killed one idea (three-way splits), and written down why. No engineer has touched it yet. No Figma file exists. The engineer will be pulled in on Thursday, once the PM and designer are satisfied, and their job will not be "build this." It will be "make this safe to ship."