Your Spec Driven Workflow Is Just Waterfall With Extra Steps
December 9, 2025
AI coding tools were supposed to change everything. And they did! But maybe just not how we expected. The first wave was chaos. Vibe coding. Let the AI write whatever it wants and hope for the best. It worked well for prototypes, but fell apart for anything real.
So the community course-corrected. The answer was structure in form of Spec-driven development. Generate requirements, then a design doc, then a task list, then let the agent execute. Tools like Kiro and spec-kit promised to keep agents on track with meticulous planning.It sounded smart. It felt responsible. And it’s a trap.
Source: Your Spec Driven Workflow Is Just Waterfall With Extra Steps
Many if not most of today’s software developers will never have heard of waterfall development or might think it’s something to do with performance tooling.
When I studied software engineering many many years ago, Waterfall was the state of the art because prior to that, it had simply been chaos.
The idea behind waterfall development is there would be strict phases of software engineering from requirements gathering through the specification, coding, testing, delivery, and maintenance. Something like that from memory, and this was then meant to ensure that we had software quality.
Waterfall has long since been abandoned for agile methods. The Agile Manifesto was all about moving away from waterfall.
Something curious has happened in the last year or so when it comes to AI and software engineering. Spec-driven development has gained some real interest, that many consider it to be somewhat like waterfall. This particular piece treats spec-driven development as a kind of structure. Draw man. But I think it’s worth considering the point being made.
