Architecture, Specification, Execution: A Paradigm for AI-Accelerated Development
December 8, 2025
In this post, I’m going to share a paradigm that’s been working for me. To be clear: I’m not advocating for any particular products – Copilot, Kiro, Cursor, they’re all amazing. What I’m offering is an approach that works regardless of which tools you choose, delivering the compounding returns vibe coding never reaches.
Here’s the core principle: carve the path for AI to follow, don’t walk it yourself.
Your job as the engineer is to set direction, establish constraints, and define success. AI’s job is to execute within those boundaries. Mix these roles and you’ll just muddy the waters.
This paradigm builds on spec-driven development, and it consists of three pillars:
- Architecture – Document the decisions that shape your system
- Specification – Define the features within those constraints
- Execution – Prompt and let it run
Source: Architecture, Specification, Execution: A Paradigm for AI-Accelerated Development
We’ve been collecting approaches to developing with AI and large language models as software engineers, not because we necessarily think a specific approach is the right one, but because we’re at such an early stage, it’s interesting to see these patterns emerge.
Here Anthony Martinović shares his approach.
