What's this about?
Spec-Driven Development is a fast-emerging practice: a structured natural-language specification — written by a developer or, more often, drafted by an AI tool and then curated by the developer — drives the agent's implementation. SPECMINE collects a large-scale corpus of these artifacts so the practice can be studied rather than just advocated.
What is spec-driven development?
Instead of prompting an agent task by task, you first write down what the thing should do in structured prose, review that, and only then let the agent build from it. The spec becomes the artifact under version control and human review; the code becomes downstream output. The claim is that reviewing a specification is cheaper and more reliable than reviewing generated code — the same argument that made design docs valuable, now with a mechanical consumer at the other end.
Why does this matter to you?
- "Usually AI-drafted and then human-curated" is an accurate description of how the practice actually works, and worth being honest about.
- A corpus means we can start asking which specs produced good outcomes, rather than trading anecdotes.
- It connects to today's small-models thread, where several people found that a well-designed spec plus a small model beat a vague prompt plus a frontier model.