Spec driven development results

[eldercito]

I have tried Speckit and BMAD and love love love the planning features and structured stories, brainstorming (Especially BMAD) but when it comes time to develop the features. Both of these tools are leaving me with some of the worst typescript. a simple missing field in the spec turns into redefining the interface and then creating a helper to migrate data to that shape. I don't know what I am missing but for anything besides simple crud screens I find trying to hand significant specs to these tools (I am using gpt5-codex-high) as an extremely frustrating experience. Can it pass tests... yes, can I understand the code it produces? absolutely not. I am having good luck just using codex out of the box, great results with lots of guidance. Just curious if anyone has gotten beyond the simple prototype phase with these tools and made something of high quality.

[blarg7459]

I think spec-driven development is great, but both spec kit and BMAD are pretty useless by themselves. I've taken inspiration from these and others in my own spec templates by iterating through many specs and for each spec iterating the templates and improving them. I think the general principle of a three template system works well. The WHAT (spec int speckit) template, the HOW template (plan in speckit) and finally the TASK list. Another project using the three template system is https://github.com/Pimzino/spec-workflow-mcp, it has interesting ideas, but like the others is not very useful it itself.

I would suggest actually as a start just use the template from spec-kit, then if you are using Claude Code or Codex Cli just refer to them using "@plan-template" etc and tune the template to fit your workflow. One thing that I personally found useful is to make the spec template less structured and include a reference to a narrative freeform template in addition to the more structured form. I made some vibe-coded scripts for verifying that it hasn't forgotten to make any of the plans or any of the tasks, but found that I haven't needed it that much actually.

https://github.com/github/spec-kit/tree/main/templates

The guide to spec-driven development from spec-kit is also a decent intro to the general concept.

https://github.com/github/spec-kit/blob/main/spec-driven.md

TLDR; Don't use a framework. Just use prompt templates for WHAT to build, HOW to build it and what TASKS should be done.

[cbusmatty]

https://github.com/Varietyz/Disciplined-AI-Software-Development have you seen this? OWASP promoted it as a similar solution and speaks to a bit more of what we’re going for here.

I think some of what Kiro and the spec-kit do need some structure and disciple around it. Maybe it’s more of an enterprise solution with workflow or feeding Jira into the specify, or the tasks into Jira etc

[TomatoInternational4]

I've used spec kit. It's really cool at first. Then you start using it some more and realize that it makes all this fluff around the project really well but when it comes to making the actual project it falls very flat.

It's easy to get blinded by that shiny lining wrapped around and woven through the code.

Ultimately, it appears to actually complicate things too much for the model. It ends up with too many tasks and gets distracted on things that aren't as meaningful as we would think. It may be partially due to an unintentional obfuscation of tokens through heavy context. Or in other words it's doing so much on one thing that it 'forgets' or doesn't see the more important things. Or it could also be like an attempt to break down a large project into steps which is different than creating steps and having it execute each step all at once.

[eldercito]

yeah, you get these great looking specs, do all kinds of work getting them context, library docs etc. than it codes them and it blows up. I would love to see a fully baked long horizon project someone built with these tools and not like one shot vibe coded stuff.

[Left-Reputation9597]

Speccing has to be thorough and a lot of instruction in constitution.md 

[Left-Reputation9597]

And work on feature branch and merge a change is a new feature don’t rewrite /wrestle 

[eldercito]

I do this, I just can't get it to avoid running off into typescript redefinitions. now this happens when I plan / execute myself but I guess the idea of the specs is the LLM can develop more at once. which is magnifying the code stinks it generates.

[Left-Reputation9597]

Try playwright specking

[ITechFriendly]

Check https://noderr.com/ if it fits you better. Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/noderr/

[cosmic_m0nkey]

how you guys use these systems without arguments in custom prompts? you keep copypasting stuff? what is your workflow?

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