Addy Osmani Spec-Driven Development: The AI Is Not the Bottleneck—Your Specification Is

Addy Osmani·medium signal

Addy Osmani's 'How to Write a Good Spec for AI Agents' argues that the $300K production bugs attributed to AI coding are specification failures, not model failures. In hierarchical multi-agent patterns, a Feature Lead receiving 'Build the search feature' decomposes into Data, Logic, and API subagents autonomously—the parent orchestrator never sees those details, enabling 3x deeper decomposition without exploding context windows. The skill: write specs that define acceptance criteria, edge cases, and constraints explicitly, because agents will optimize for exactly what you specify and nothing more. Underspecified prompts produce underspecified code.