Documentation on AIgile

An assessment of spec-driven development

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Spec-driven development (SDD) is the software industry’s first structured answer to coding agents. The idea is to write a specification first and let agents build against it. Tools such as GitHub Spec Kit, AWS Kiro, and Tessl put this idea into practice, and many teams use them today.

What SDD gets right

Three ideas inside SDD hold up well, and aigile builds on all of them. Agents work much better with clear, written, lasting context than with ad hoc chat prompts. Some project knowledge really is foundational, such as architecture rules, domain invariants, and key decisions, and writing it down helps everyone. And breaking work into small, well-described tasks improves both what agents produce and what humans can review.

Glossary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Every term of the method, one sentence each, grouped by kind. For terms that also appear in the working paper’s glossary, the working paper remains canonical; this file adds the terms introduced after it (standards and domain files, intent weights, the readiness gate, the slicing vocabulary, findings) and is the complete current register.

Written artifacts

Full treatments: the artifact layers, the constitution, the working loop, and the practitioner guide for complete examples of each artifact.

Downloads

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

All content on this site is published as plain markdown, with the working paper additionally available as PDF. The files may be read, forked, and supplied to agents as working context.

Start here

The working paper (PDF) or markdown: the whole method in one document.
The practitioner guide: one feature carried through the complete loop, twice (a collaborative team and an agentic one), with copy-able artifact templates.
The reading guide: which deep dive covers what.
The glossary: every term of the method in one sentence.

The deep dives, by topic

Why feedback beats upfront specs (01, the backward edge)
Organizing project documents (02, the artifact layers)
Project rules that can change safely (03, the constitution)
Making review affordable (04, review economics)
When specs and code disagree (05, deviation and drift)
Keeping humans in charge of what matters (06, validation)
How much agents may do on their own (07, the authority matrix)
Learning that lasts (08, retrospectives and gardening)
Slicing the work (09, the craft of slicing)

Everything at once

aigile-complete-bundle.zip: all documents in one folder structure, suitable for a repository. Inside the bundle the papers keep their canonical numbered names (01-the-backward-edge.md and so on), because the kit and the papers cross-reference them that way.

Figures

The framework figures are available as SVG for reuse: the loop, the authority matrix, the artifact layers.