On Spec
As I slow-walk toward the end of Phase I for Slowpoke, I've decided to add a new wrinkle. Lately, I've seen more press on Spec Driven Development , in which a developer writes specifications following opinionated guidelines to direct AI agents in their coding excursions. I've only done some rudimentary research, but the idea is that the specs the developer generates are intended to be living, iterative documents, not fixed points in time. By keeping the scope smaller, agents are expected to wander less and generate more serviceable code. I'm skeptical. At first, coding agents were expected to read a comprehensive Agents.md or Claude.md file and use that for the principles of implementation. Then we learned that if one of those documents exceeds 150 lines, the agent will ignore most of it. Enter skills, which are supposed to be more targeted. I created a skill for generating partial Astro pages that are returned from an htmx AJAX-style call. Exce...