Spec Driven Development Fans, You'll Love sdd-flow
TL;DR
Built a Claude Code skill that forces research, spec, implementation, critical reviews and code review for one-shotting features. Used it to build Redakt (GDPR PII anonymizer) with six features in two days. Skill and plugin are open source.
Last week I shipped Redakt, an open-source GDPR compliance tool. Six features for a web UI and REST API to help us better handle PII (Personally Identifiable Information).
I had been using the spec driven development (SDD) process for months through a plugin I built. When I saw that Claude had expanded the context window to a million tokens, I thought to myself, "Why not try to push the limits of how I was developing software?" What I mean by that is that the SDD process was created to help with context management. It follows a traditional and rigorous software development cycle, but it was slow relative to how fast things move within the AI space. I decided to try just one-shotting a feature using a skill to orchestrate the phases of a development cycle, and it worked surprisingly well.
The skill was not the only thing that optimized the process. Anthropic's release of --permission-mode auto last week was the push that I needed to remove the diapers. I was excited to try it out. This mode is limited for now to Teams accounts. It was flaky initially, but it gave me a taste of the forbidden fruit. I didn't want to go back to confirming every request. At home, I knew there was another option though, a dangerous one, that I had avoided until now: --dangerously-skip-permissions. After close to a year of using Claude, and never having had any "oh shit" moments, I decided to remove all guardrails and bypass permissions. It felt like my face was being pushed back by gravity as you see in fighter pilot videos when they fly at multiple Machs... and the feeling is addictive.
SDD, Not STD
Not STD, as my speech-to-text model often spits out. Specification-driven development guides the AI to research the codebase and the requirements, write the specification, and then implement against that specification. The spec becomes what you version-control and review, while the code is output.
I liked the concept and loved the results.