Great talk on YT about “Spec-First Development”

On YT Advanced Context Engineering for Agents by Dexter Horthy.

My notes:

“I no longer read every line of code because I read the specs and I know they are right.”

Goals:

  • Works well in big complex databases
  • Solves complex problems.
  • No “slop”
  • Mental alignment

Don’t chit chat with the AI. “You’re absolutely right” = Time to start over with better specs.

Subagents are about context control.

  1. Research
  2. Plan
  3. Implement Human review for each step! Code Review for mental alignment (i.e. the plan)

Leverage: Bad line in a plan can mean hundreds of lines of bad code. Where to spend time? You can get a lot more for your time doing research and writing specs correctly.

What’s next:

  • Team/workflow transformation is hard.