Last year I shipped BaxEnergy's Farsight with a team of 20-25 developers. It took 14 months. Right now I'm shipping Positron Flux, a product of comparable scope, by myself in under two quarters. The difference is spec-driven development with AI agents.

I tried vibe coding first. It's a fine starting point, but it hits a wall fast. What actually works is treating your specs as the real product: RFCs, ADRs, functional and non-functional requirements, all written precisely enough that agents can build against them and you can verify the result. Code becomes a build artifact.

I'll show a real feature going from spec to production and explain the method and tooling behind it. But the main point of this talk is bigger than a workflow. Most of what we've been calling "software engineering" is really coordination cost. Remove the coordination, and one skilled architect can replace the team they used to manage.

The catch? The hard problems don't go away. They concentrate. Specification, QA, delivery: the stuff AI can't do for you. It turns out the bottleneck was never writing code. It was knowing precisely what to build. And most of us aren't as good at that as we think.