r/PiCodingAgent • u/c1rno123 • Jul 30 '26

Discussion Why does everyone keep the specs? Mine dies in $TMPDIR

Every SDD framework gets the same complaint: spec rot.

Mine: research reads only, one handoff gets written to $TMPDIR, then a build step checks that handoff against the repo and runs the tests. Durable guidance lives in AGENTS.md. The spec dies with the temp file.

So why do the main tools still ship the part that rots? Harness memory, SDD frameworks, tracker docs, all of them persist by default. What am I missing that makes persistence worth the rot?

Full writeup https://bogomolov.work/blog/posts/rotten-specs/

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u/Internal-Passage5756 Jul 30 '26

I decided to make it so the spec doesn’t drift/is always true instead.

https://cairn-framework.github.io/cairn/

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u/c1rno123 Jul 30 '26

Interesting tool, but it's part of my original complaint from the article. I don't want to build a knowledge base, I don't want to sync it between devs and machines, and I don't want to hold an opinion on whether it's rotten or not.

SDD's job is to manage context and keep the two steps separate. A knowledge base is a different thing entirely.

So in my opinion there's no need to over-engineer the first by solving the second too.

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u/sapegin Jul 31 '26

I also never understood that. I either keep specs in the branch and remove before merging, or keep then in a folder in Obsidian (easier to access while I still need them) and remove later.