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3 posts tagged with "future-of-development"

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Stacking OpenSpec and Superpowers: A Combined SDD Workflow

· 11 min read
Austin Xu
Austin Xu
Cloud Platform Engineering Leader @ eBay

This is a follow-up to From Vibe Coding to Spec-Driven Development. That post documented introducing OpenSpec into an existing Finance project. This one covers a new project where I stacked OpenSpec with Superpowers from day one.

After three months of running OpenSpec on my Finance project, I'd formed a clear picture of what it's good at and where it struggles. On a personal wiki project I'd also been using Superpowers, and its brainstorming, TDD, and code-review skills were landing real hits.

So I started a new project — a UTR-based tennis team lineup app (tennis-lineup) — specifically to run both tools together and see how they compose. This post is the report.

[7/6] Claude Code: From Vibe Coding to Spec-Driven Development

· 13 min read
Austin Xu
Austin Xu
Cloud Platform Engineering Leader @ eBay

This is an extended chapter to the 6-part Claude Code series. The first six chapters documented building a full-stack Finance app using Vibe Coding. This chapter covers what came next.

The first six chapters documented the complete journey of using Claude Code for Vibe Coding — building a full-stack application from scratch and accumulating 40,000 lines of code. Vibe Coding delivered incredible speed, but as the project grew, a structural problem emerged:

AI writes code fast. AI also goes off-track fast.

When you describe a requirement in one sentence, AI might understand 70% of it and then sprint full-speed in that direction for two hours — only for you to realize the core logic is wrong and have to start over.

This isn't theoretical. Before adopting SDD, my real pain points in the Finance project were:

  • Unstructured workflow: I had to remind AI to organize requirements before writing code, otherwise it jumped straight to implementation
  • Missing design documentation: architectural issues only surfaced after implementation, making course corrections expensive
  • Inconsistent code quality: the same requirement could produce wildly different code quality across sessions
  • Tests routinely skipped: Vibe Coding tends toward "get it running first," making tests optional
  • Slow debugging: without clear task boundaries, bugs were hard to locate and back-and-forth with AI was inefficient

This chapter documents a methodology upgrade experiment: introducing Spec-Driven Development (SDD) into the Finance project using OpenSpec, completing three new features, and comparing results against prior Vibe Coding work.