Handoff-Driven Development Proposes Structured Spec System for AI-Assisted Coding

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A development methodology called Handoff-Driven Development (HDD) builds on spec-driven development to help solo developers and small teams manage AI coding workflows more effectively. The approach organizes project documentation into a hierarchical specs/ folder structure, allowing AI models to locate relevant context in two or three navigation hops without loading unnecessary information. Each specification file is assigned a genre — such as as-built, plan, reference, or vision — drawn loosely from the Diátaxis documentation framework but with a custom taxonomy. A reachability invariant ensures every spec file is linked through a chain of markdown maps, with orphaned documents flagged by an audit script. A template repository is available for teams to clone and configure automatically using an AI assistant like Opus.

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