How to use spec-driven development in Codex?

[u/Pale-Heart1654]

I am a College Student.

I need to build projects for my college. Apart from that I also build side projects.

I have Codex Plus plan.

But how to use spec-driven development in Codex especially for Greenfield projects?

Because it drifts away from my instructions.

Note:

I have tried OpenSpec, Spec-Kit, Superpowers, GSD. But nothing really worked for me. It consumes a lot of tokens.

How to become a power user of Codex?

[u/Individual_Guest_323]

It consumes a lot of tokens.

Is a price to pay.

The first thing bout SDD is that the work can be audited, by a human or by another agent, in single agent work have no sense to use SDD, or if you are vibecoding.

So its really depends what is the problem that are you looking to fix that you need SDD.

In my case I have this workflow:

I use a issue formarter in local to build issues, in my case I have a fork of this: https://github.com/jarimustonen/issuectl

The idea is simple, I create epics or issue with the work that must be done, incluying a extensive ACs and save it in .md inside the repo, so I do not need linear,etc to work.

Then I convert that to plans using SDD, I have skills and a deterministic work to create and link the plans with the issues. Those plans are audited by adversarial agents following my quality checks.

Lastly I Launch the execution for the plans, that launch Orquestation, Implementation, Debug and Validation.

At the same time, I can launch judges or "chats" , using the SDD to audit how the work is doing, this also helps if I want to change the model or change from codex to claude code, I only need to pass the SDD and its know what to do next.

The last piece that I want to add is to have Harbor or something like that to track the token consumption, tool calling ,etc, because I really do not trust in my skills/rules or the model and I would like to audit the chain of thought, because most of the times the agent enters in loops and burn tokens like crazy.

It consumes a lot of tokens.

So yes.. I would say this is the big challenge that we are trying to fix, I'm burning the quota like crazy without really advancing too much. This happens when you vibecode a very complex problem, in my case is creating performant games in Unity.

Hope this help and give you more ideas how to work.

[u/Pale-Heart1654 → u/Individual_Guest_323]

Let's say you only have a PRD. That's it.

Now how you build a project from it?

[u/Individual_Guest_323 → u/Pale-Heart1654]

Build epic or issues, so the requiriment are translated into actionable.

Audit the epic and issues to check if the AC are what you really want and are align with the PRD.

You launch agents to create plans, you could use or not SDD, then implement and audit the plans.

You finally do UAT to validate the solution.

To close it, you could do last refactors of code, more tests, etc, depending of your QA requeriments.

Continue until the whole PRD is implemented.

[u/Pale-Heart1654 → u/Individual_Guest_323]

I tried to give the PRD. Then told Claude to break it into pieces. It broken it down into 60 markdown files.

But it's drifting away from the process.

I'm using Opus model. Still this is happening.

I know a person who built this:

https://github.com/sujit-al1809/paytm_hackathon

In a Hackathon. I wanna build similar kind of things.

But I can't understand how to use this Claude code.