Comment by gps372
5 hours ago
Looks like this will be a hard sell for many orgs who are already struggling with explosion of artifacts on JIRA, sharepoint, github, etc. Also, most of them have somewhat settled on some ways (in past 6-8 months) to produce AI first specs and work with them.
Also, this looks like something which leadership level folks need to adopt first and then somehow it needs to trickle down to PI planning and sprint planning. Would like to hear someone's experience on how this has got adopted in their org.
I use it at a much smaller scale. I think that's also the right place, because its a CLI tool + skills that generate md files. Not something you'd give to a business person. I start from a single ticket (sometimes just a handful of changes, but I want the spec as docs) to changes that you'd normally split over several tickets.
Basically the flow proposal -> design -> specs -> tasks gives you and AI a method to build context on what you want to achieve. In a way you're just creating a plan/big prompt that is structured in such a way that they start stacking on each other.
The power is that you do a lot of upfront thinking. In my team we then share it with a colleague who will review it through a PR. After that implementation is usually hands off. At the end there is a skill to verify the change against specs. I do still review the code myself too.
I guess if you work in a task oriented environment this will not work as well, as you'd lack/don't care about the business context. I'd like to think that most software development does not happen like this, but is done by engineers who actually understand why something is needed and take that into account when designing and building the solution.
>> The power is that you do a lot of upfront thinking
This is the best part of this spec, but we have found from our experience that though upfront thinking changes has a lot of merits and adds clarity and alignment upfront, but it changes bit by bit in every meeting and before you know your specs are not aligned with general consensus in the team. If your team is large enough, then it gets very difficult to own the task of constructing alignment between your principal-artifacts and your evolved under-current of understanding.
If you check my submissions (https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gps372), I have written whole set of articles on the myths of how easy it is keep the understanding consistent.
I would still say that if you are working on a platform and if your engg team size if anything more than 25-30, then this spec must be adopted from top-down and not bottoms up. Bottom level engineers usually don't have the level of consistent exposures (as and when they socialize and evangelize their platform) which top level engineers have.
OpenSpec maintainer here. A lot of our adoption has mainly been bottoms-up, it's usually driven by engineers. That being said it definitely helps if everyone on the team uses it together. Especially when shifting left and doing a lot more "spec review".
Thanks for taking time to respond here. Would love to know from your experience the scale of function-points, team size, client-requirement variance, etc. different teams would have worked with and maintained over a period of time via this open-spec.
Please note that I can already see that github repo has 68k+ stars. So popularity is not in question, just the viability and consistency of adoption across different scenarios.