Spec-Driven Development: Writing Software Specs Before Code to Guide AI Agents

A developer built a React Native MVP that lists recent global earthquakes using Spec-Driven Development (SDD), a methodology that prioritizes written specifications before any code is produced. SDD separates work into three distinct artifacts — a specification defining what and why, a technical plan covering how, and a breakdown of verifiable tasks — which an AI coding agent then implements against. The approach addresses a key problem with AI-assisted development: without a prior specification, agents make reasonable but undocumented default decisions that can be discovered only weeks later. Ambiguities such as minimum earthquake magnitude, time range, and offline behavior are resolved in writing upfront, rather than buried in a chat session. Tools like GitHub's Spec Kit can automate this workflow by generating these artifacts as versioned files within the project repository.
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