For a minute, it seemed like SDD tools like Kiro, OpenSpec/SpecKit, Tessl were gonna be the future of coding agents. It seemed like a good idea to me at least, and it resolved a lot of the issues people were having with coding agents kinda just going off and doing their own thing.
Nowadays though, it seems like all the SDD tools have kinda fallen off but all of the complaints remain—coding agents still improvise code that doesn’t fall under the user’s requirements all the time. Did we all just collectively decide that /plan mode was enough?
mikgp•42m ago
But the reason you don’t have to read assembly when you write in a higher language is that, over time that abstraction has become largely complete and is deterministic.
Like when you write I dunno Python to add two numbers and calls class, that spec is universal and agreed upon. ~99.99% of the time when you read Python documentation, and replicate it, it does what the designers intended.
Spec driven development is none of those things. So while I’d like to see people experiment with higher level languages, I think many folks find there’s now way to consistently reconcile the spec with the code.
As much as no one wants to read the code anymore, it seems like most people seem to agree it’s the only source of truth.