arXiv AI

Spec-Driven Development as Prescribed and as Practiced

Spec-Driven Development (SDD) is a practice where developers and AI coding agents write specifications to guide software implementation, aiming to preserve the intent behind natural‑language instructions. This study analyzes SDD through Reddit discussions, interviews with 21 practitioners (including eight tool makers), and a large corpus of 470,795 spec files from 73,030 GitHub repositories. Findings reveal that while specs often include implementation details that aid agents, they also risk decay; tool-specific structures influence perception, and benefits vary between individuals and teams, with SDD mainly used for new features and involving higher planning and review costs.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

SpecMine: A Large-Scale Corpus of Spec-Driven Development Artifacts

SpecMine is a large-scale corpus that documents Spec-Driven Development (SDD) artifacts in public GitHub repositories. It includes a broad census of 470,795 spec files from 73,030 repositories linked to 17 tools, a focused census of 98,574 Kiro layout files from 12,910 repositories, and a sweep of 5,992 pull requests across 581 repositories that modify specs. The dataset provides enriched metadata, full commit histories, parsed document structures, and over 2.4 million typed references connecting specs to code, sibling documents, PRs, branches, and issues.

By Shyam Agarwal, Anmol Singhal, Travis Breaux, Bogdan Vasilescu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

From Agent Behaviour to Agent-Friendly Documentation: An Empirical Study of How Coding Agents Discover, Read, and Write Technical Documentation

The study investigates how autonomous coding agents interact with technical documentation, analyzing 557 coding sessions and 33,097 pull requests. Findings reveal that agents primarily engage with agent-facing artefacts, show weak links between documentation consultation and code editing, lack explicit validation sequences, and tend to consult documentation after code changes. The authors propose a two‑lobed cycle model of agent‑documentation interaction and challenge assumptions about actionability and verifiability of agent‑friendly documentation.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

SDAD: Spec-Driven Agentic Development for the AI-Native SDLC

The paper introduces Spec-Driven Agentic Development (SDAD), a framework that leverages large language models to ingest extensive functional requirement documents and repository context in a single workflow, turning specification quality into the engine for autonomous software delivery. SDAD blends disciplined upfront formalisation with rapid implementation, encompassing intent capture, machine‑readable specifications, agentic synthesis, and multi‑agent verification with human sign‑off. It positions AI‑code as a fourth production paradigm, compares it to traditional Waterfall and Agile approaches, and extends the model to team role evolution, quantitative governance metrics, and a staged migration blueprint for practical adoption.

By Vu Hung Nguyen, Thanh Nguyen
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Professional Software Developers Don't Vibe, They Control: AI Agent Use for Coding in 2025

The paper titled "Professional Software Developers Don't Vibe, They Control: AI Agent Use for Coding in 2025" examines how experienced developers employ AI agents in software development. Through field observations and surveys, it finds that developers value agents for productivity but maintain control over design and implementation to ensure quality. They use agents as collaborative tools rather than full delegation, selecting tasks based on suitability and leveraging their expertise to guide agent behavior.

By Ruanqianqian Huang, Avery Reyna, Sorin Lerner, Haijun Xia, Brian Hempel
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

SpecFirst: Behavioral Specification Elicitation as a First-Class Step in Agent-Based Program Synthesis from Scratch

LLM-based agents excel at software engineering tasks where an existing codebase provides context, but constructing a program from scratch remains fundamentally harder. Recent benchmarks such as ProgramBench quantify this gap: given only natural-language documentation and an execute-only binary as a behavioral oracle, even frontier models solve fewer than 1% of instances.