Why Writing Specs First Can Actually Speed Up Software Development

A founding engineer at Cendra argues that writing design specifications before building software accelerates development rather than slowing it down, challenging the common startup belief that documentation is a luxury. Over a 12-month period, the engineer produced 255 design specs, 207 implementation plans, and 17 production runbooks alongside 377 production releases across four repositories. The core argument is that drafting a specification forces the writer to confront gaps in their understanding before any code is written, surfacing design flaws at the cheapest possible stage. Discovering a flaw in a document costs far less than finding it after a schema is built, features depend on it, or data is already in production. The author acknowledges there is no control group to prove specifications caused the release cadence, but contends the mechanism — not the correlation — is what makes the practice transferable to other teams.