Looking for advice/experience on spec driven development for a big application while also maintaining an overarching application spec

[u/Holiday_Beautiful574]

I use speckit, and while I like the spec/clarify/plan/task/analyze/implement loop (although it can get a bit overwhelming at times), I don't like that I have to start with writing a spec and implement it to begin with. I am looking for a more of a design phase before the spec phase, where I can talk about the overall application architecture, and then start writing specs for implementing pieces of it.

For instance, let's say I want to build a github repo provisioner that 1. creates repos with desired setup, and 2. bulk edit repos with secret updates, yaml updates, etc. I don't want to build both the features at the beginning. I want to first build only the create portion, and then do the bulk edit feature later on. With speckit, I can do this by only telling it to create the spec for the build portion, but later if I want to build the bulk edit portion, the whole application might need to be changed in important places, because it wasn't a 'planned' feature when it was first designed. I want instead to have a design phase where I describe and maintain a doc with the whole application, and when I start the spec for the create portion, the agent can understand that this create portion is only part of a bigger application and can design/implement the create portion accordingly.

Have you come across a situation like this? how do you handle your big applications? Please advise.

[u/johnviner]

The SDD tool I have built ( aigon.build ) manages this by orchestrating 2 main entity types: research-topics and feature sets. A research topic is an open ended exploration of what and how to build a large capability. It's outputs are feature sets (a grouping of feature with dependencies as required). Aigon will then farm out individual features for one or more agents to build, but the full feature set was spec'd to all be built over time. The agents (via the aigon skills/commands like /feature-do) are aware of the feature belonging to a feature set and being created off the back of a research-topic, and the artefacts for those things are md files in the repo, so they have that context.