Why did spec-driven development never take off - the workflow tools like Amazon’s Kiro or GitHub Workspaces encouraged?
@dexhorthy, founder of HumanLayer:
“These projects have a really interesting idea: you maintain a set of specifications for your software, and then you maintain the code itself, and the dream is the coding part is just compiling specs into code.
But that part never really materialized. I’m on a GitHub issue in spec kit that’s been open for a year, and every couple of weeks I get a new email on the thread of people complaining about the same problem:
I edit my specs and then I edit the code, and the code drifts from the specs. How do I keep the specs up to date as the code is changing?
You now have two sources of truth, and it stops being useful. That’s why with RPI (Research, Plan, Implement), the docs are tactical execution docs - I do the research, the plan, the implementation, and I throw the docs out.
The next time I need research I just do it from scratch, because tokens are cheap and my time is expensive.”