I’ve done spec driven development using a bunch of markdown files. That works fine but what I have found really works is using beads: https://github.com/steveyegge/beads

I’m letting the agent help me draft the specs anyway and I found that the agent is a lot more focused when it can traverse a task tree using beads.

It’s the one spec or planning tool that I find really helps get things done without a bunch of intervention.

Another technique I employ is I require each task to be TDD. So every feature has two tasks: write tests that fail, implement feature and don’t notify me until tests complete. Then I ask the agent to tell me how to review the task and require I review every task before moving to the next one. I love this process because the agent tells me exactly what commands to run to review the task. Then I do a code review and ask it questions. Reading agent code is exhausting so I try to make the tasks as discrete and minimal as possible.

These are simple techniques that humans employ during development and I find it worked very well.

There are also times when I need to write some docs to help me better understand the problem and I usually just dump those in a specs folder.

I think spec-kit is an interesting idea but too heavy handed. Just use beads and you’ll see what I mean.

Another technique I employed for a fully vibed tool (https://github.com/neurosnap/zmx) is to have the agent get as far as possible in a project and then I completely rewrite it using the agent code purely as a reference.

Not sure why Steve re-inveted a VCS for agents, if you just use Github/Gitlab all this stuff is properly tracked and surfaced.

This sounds promising! Could you give us examples of how you give instructions to the coding agent?