@PawelHuryn: Spec-Driven Development was always BS. It never worked for humans. Waterfall lost to agile because you discover what yo…

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Summary

This tweet argues that Spec-Driven Development is ineffective for AI agents, drawing parallels to the failure of waterfall methodology in software development. It advocates for 'intent engineering'—communicating context, strategy, and constraints to agents to handle unknown unknowns.

Spec-Driven Development was always BS. It never worked for humans. Waterfall lost to agile because you discover what you actually need while building, not in a spec written up front. Thariq's field guide is the clearest proof it's the same for agents: the unknowns surface during the work and after it. The fix isn't hunting down every unknown unknown either. It's communicating the context beyond the goal, the why and the strategy and the constraints, so the agent navigates the unknowns you never listed. I've been calling this intent engineering since January. Agents don't fail because the model is weak. They fail because the intent is incomplete.
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Cached at: 07/04/26, 04:50 PM

Spec-Driven Development was always BS.

It never worked for humans. Waterfall lost to agile because you discover what you actually need while building, not in a spec written up front. Thariq’s field guide is the clearest proof it’s the same for agents: the unknowns surface during the work and after it.

The fix isn’t hunting down every unknown unknown either. It’s communicating the context beyond the goal, the why and the strategy and the constraints, so the agent navigates the unknowns you never listed.

I’ve been calling this intent engineering since January. Agents don’t fail because the model is weak. They fail because the intent is incomplete.

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