The shift to AI-assisted coding has revealed a critical failure point: vague requirements. When an AI agent is given a non-deterministic prompt, the resulting code is often inconsistent, brittle, and violates the project's architecture. This is especially challenging for community FOSS projects where architectural governance is informal.

This session presents a practical solution: Spec-Driven Development (SDD), using the open-source toolkit Spec Kit alongside the lightweight OpenSpec framework. This combination forces clarity by making the specification the primary, executable, and reviewable artifact.

We use hackmum.in, our community website and its Astro (JavaScript) repository as a live case study to demonstrate how to transition an existing FOSS codebase into an SDD-governed environment.

You will learn the unified FOSS-centric SDD workflow:

Establishing the Constitution: Using Spec Kit's constitution feature to define non-negotiable project principles (e.g., "Must be Astro-compatible," "All new features must pass Lighthouse accessibility standards") that guide the AI agent's decisions.

The FOSS-Friendly Artifact Model: Implementing OpenSpec's separation of specs/ (the source of truth) from changes/ (the proposal). This ensures clean, auditable diffs and makes human code review easier, which is crucial for community collaboration.

The Agent's Execution Pipeline: A live walkthrough of the Spec Kit four-phase process (Specify, Plan, Tasks, Implement) to develop a complex feature (e.g., a community event tracker), showing how the AI agent is guided by the markdown specifications to generate clean, high-quality JavaScript code.

Beyond Greenfields: Demonstrating how this methodology is superior for modifying existing functionality—the common reality of FOSS maintenance—ensuring new code adheres to the existing architecture of the hackerspaceMumbai/blog repository.

Attendees will leave with a clear, open-source blueprint for adopting Spec Kit and OpenSpec to maintain code quality, accelerate contribution velocity, and tame the chaos of AI-assisted development in any web project.