AI-assisted development has made it possible to generate working code from little more than a prompt—but as systems grow, “vibe coding” quickly breaks down. Requirements drift, architectural decisions are lost in chat history, and teams are left reverse-engineering intent from generated code. For engineers, architects, and team leads responsible for real systems, this creates risk, rework, and governance challenges.

This session introduces Spec-Driven Development (SDD) as a pragmatic evolution of AI-assisted engineering. Instead of treating prompts as ephemeral instructions, SDD formalizes intent into durable, versioned specifications that guide AI agents throughout design, implementation, and change. We’ll walk through the core SDD lifecycle—proposal, review, implementation, and archival—and show how it complements modern DevOps and architecture practices rather than replacing them.

Using the OpenSpec framework, we’ll explore how teams can decouple requirements from chat sessions, preserve architectural decisions, and give AI coding agents clear, testable boundaries. Attendees will see how specs become a shared contract between humans and AI, enabling faster iteration without sacrificing clarity, traceability, or control.

This talk focuses on practical patterns you can apply immediately to scale AI-assisted development responsibly across teams and systems.