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Mike is a software developer.

He had been asking for better requirements for years.

Not because he loved writing documentation — because he was tired of building the wrong thing.

The product owner would create a one-line ticket. He was always busy and also hated writing)

Then, in backlog refinement:

“Everyone understands?”

Nod. Nod.

Next ticket.

And then off the developers go to implement it.

Mike gets the blame

QA started reporting so many bugs, so many scenarios that developers didn’t think of.

The product owner saw the feature and shook his head:

“This isn’t what we wanted. You’ve basically implemented the wrong thing”

Mike was frustrated. This kept happening.

He brought it up to management.

The answer?

“We can't spend half the sprint on requirements.”
“Just start coding.”
“You’re the developer. You should figure it out.”

Then AI arrived

Suddenly, specifications were a priority.

Now management was pushing Spec-Driven Development down on the whole team.

Mike’s reaction?

“Wait. NOW specifications are important?”

But there was another problem.

AI would skip parts of the requirements or misinterpret them.

Unlike a developer would at least try to follow the specification, not skip stuff.

AI gives Mike more work

Mike has to spend a lot of time like reviewing AI’s work, and management is now angry at him. They’re paying for all these AI tools, but delivery is still not fast enough.

He’s really frustrated, because now he has to do a lot of checking: did AI actually satisfy the specifications or not?

And he has to do it all manually, like manually testing things before handing it over to QA — and it’s just boring, tedious.

Mike takes back control

Then Mike discovered that if you do Spec-Driven Development with actually executable specifications, that problem pretty much disappears.

So instead of just giving a user story to AI, he’d have AI turn it into acceptance tests first. He’d confirm the acceptance tests before AI started coding.

And all of a sudden, he was back in control.

AI couldn’t just do whatever it wanted.

Want to stop manually checking AI’s work?

📅 Register (free): Spec-Driven Development with ATDD & AI (Oct 14)

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Optivem Journal

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