Guides

Practical, step-by-step writing on spec-driven development, evaluation, and AI product practice

Where the field reports describe what happened, guides show you how to do it: adopting spec-driven development (SDD) on your own team, designing evaluations that catch what matters, and building an AI practice as a product manager. Written from practice, not theory.

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Data Products for Robots

AI agents are now first-class consumers of your data. A practical guide to what changes when the reader of your documentation is a machine.
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The Spec That Lints Itself

A small, free, no-dependency script that checks a markdown spec for the gaps that force an AI coding agent to guess. Download it and run it today.
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The Gate That Fires Every Time

Telling an AI assistant how you like things works for about an hour. A rule that triggers on an observable signal works indefinitely. The pattern, and the file.
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Write the Skill, Not the Answer

Solving a problem well and losing the solution is the default. A skill file turns a one-off answer into permanent capability. The structure, and the template.
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Right Knowledge, Right Lifetime

An AI assistant forgets everything between sessions unless you build the memory yourself. Three scopes, one rule, and why a lesson has to land in the file that matches its lifetime.
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Go Do X and Report Back

Skills are how I do something. Agents are go do it and come back with one report. The line between them, when to dispatch, and the brief that makes a stateless worker useful.
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The Record You Can Mine

Every work session my assistant runs is logged to a store I can query. That one habit generates my standups, finds last month's fix, and shows where my own workflow has friction. A script to start with.
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A Workspace That Maintains Itself

The difference between a tool you use and an environment you live in is who does the upkeep. Four background tasks that run without me, and the smoke test that catches a broken skill the minute it breaks.
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The Contract Comes Before the Pipeline

A data contract is the spec's last mile: the document a consumer can hold a producer to and an agent can build from. What goes in one, why each section exists, and a template.
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The Judge Needs a Rubric

A model grading your specs is only as good as the rubric it holds and the calibration set that proves it applies it your way. The rubric, the prompt, the ten-document test, and the five ways it goes wrong.
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What Kind of Change Is This?

Specs need version numbers as much as code does, and the number should be decided by rule, not by mood. A small script that reads two versions of a document and says major, minor, or patch, with reasons.