Color Me Spec-kled

I'm about halfway through the implementation phase of my first feature with spec-kit.  I won't say that my enthusiasm has cooled by half, but it's been tempered slightly.

I still like the structure the framework imposes.  One of the biggest headaches with an agent is explaining something to it, and then watching it immediately bound off as some rhinoceros-sized puppy to write a mountain of code that you have to sift through and which is often only tangentially correct.  Even when you're trying to bound the output.  Even when you try to use plan mode to carefully design your changes.  If this discretized peace is solely what SDD provides, then it's still a large improvement over letting an agent run loose in the wild.

However, it still doesn't understand good code design. [For those of you who say we no longer need to look at source code - because we don't look at compiler output, duh! and it's effectively the same thing - I'll address that in an upcoming post, and I also say good luck!]  It added a new status field to track incremental account syncs that move from 'pending' to 'posted.' All well and good until it decided to create a new function named upsertTransactionWithStatus() rather than add another optional parameter to the already existing upsertTransaction().  I have yet to meet an agent that proposes refactoring or redesign as an initial gambit.  It always chooses the more complex path.  It's like a new college hire, but far, far less trainable.

And though the spec-kit constitution imposes 80% code coverage - and the agent acknowledges this with every task - it still doesn't write additional tests to ensure we maintain that level of coverage.

I will say that it appears the testing tasks are being saved for the final phase (like any good developer, why test incrementally when you can save that work for the end?), so I'm reserving my judgement, but I'm not holding my breath.

Still, for what I was expecting, I'm still giving it an A- if I'm grading on a curve.  A solid B otherwise.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.