TL;DR

One-shotting features with /sdd-flow works until you get ambitious with complicated projects and you juggle two or three in parallel. The fix is slowing down to ship thinner slices so that reviews and what is delivered remain under your control. The new per-slice delivery mode is live in the plugin.

A Giant Pile of Shit

I thought I had mastered spec-driven development with Claude Code, and more fundamentally become an agentic coding superhero. That was until my ambitions overtook capacity. Agentic coding has gotten exceedingly powerful, but it still requires a developer to maintain close supervision, especially in more complicated scenarios.

Around six months ago I built this SDD development workflow plugin for applying a research-plan-implement cycle to software projects. Learning from my experience using it, I continued to tweak it and added additional review phases and steps that auto-corrected imperfections. It worked so well that I figured I could more fully automate the process, which led me to create the /sdd-flow skill. This allowed me to simply one-shot features (I am using "one-shot" loosely here because there are clarification and review steps involved). That worked well until my projects got complicated and one-shotting meant handling too many requirements and expectations at once. In short, I had drunk the Kool-Aid and believed AI could deliver.

The fact that I was developing several projects in parallel just compounded the mess that I found myself in. I got a little overwhelmed, and that led me to disregard sensible practices and become impatient and careless. I honestly just wanted to get to an end-state. I got irrationally hooked on delivering. And I definitely delivered. After three weeks of development and one week of trying to debug and steer the project back on course, I delivered an important lesson. I rediscovered the limits to agentic coding and AI model capabilities along with my own human limitations.

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