The Spec Growth Engine: Spec-Anchored, Drift-Enforced Architecture to Stop Silent Spec-Code Drift in AI Coding

arXiv 2606.27045·high signal

This work names two structural failure modes of AI coding agents that existing spec-driven approaches don't fully solve: context explosion (the agent reasons over the whole repo at once, degrading as the window fills) and silent spec-code drift (code evolves, the spec doesn't, and divergence stays invisible until expensive). The Spec Growth Engine couples spec to code and enforces drift detection so the two can't quietly separate. It's a concrete pattern for teams scaling agent-written code without losing the spec as ground truth.