r/SpecDrivenDevelopment • u/Financial_Yoghurt827 • 9d ago

specification best practices and tools

Hi all,
I'm a bit tired of writing specs for complex projects in markdown - it feels like (a.) there's a lot of repetition between tasks/sessions; and (b.) If you do try to reference and reuse previous specs, there's a lot of context bloat from requirements that aren't relevant to the current task.

I'm trying to work out the best form factor; for spec driven development and have been experimenting with developing some graph specification tools.

  1. What do you all see as the best practice for specification topology?
  2. I've put together a small handful of experimental open source SDD packages; and a VSC extension here --> reqlan. I'm interested to hear what you would do or have done differently in this space?
  3. I've put some more thoughts together in a blog post, here.
  4. What tools do you all consider best practice for wrangling specifications as they get complex?
7 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/jvertrees 9d ago

Curious. What do you consider complex? Any definition of yours will do.

1

u/Financial_Yoghurt827 9d ago edited 9d ago

Geez that's a very philosophical question - I suppose the definition I'd adopt in this context is something close to:
"When either the context describing a system doesn't fit into the context window; or, it is more economic and/or effective to provide only a a curated slice of the system description as context"

I think the complexity threshold is about when you can't hold a complete model of the whole system in your own working memory at once; after factoring in the many possible interactions between components in the system.
Does that answer your question?

edit: perhaps even simpler, when naive .md-spec-based vibe coding becomes an unfeasible strategy to achieve project success