Spec templates do not tell you whether a spec is good enough. EPIC offers 40 practices across 10 quality dimensions, derived from the best open-source SDD repos, for writing specs, plans and tasks that coding agents follow.
Key takeaways · AI-distilled
One interviewed team writes "must" instead of "should" in AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition → instructions because the agent may treat "should" as optional; the authors note agents fill gaps in instructions with their own assumptions.
The practices come from scoring the artifacts of 114 open-source spec-driven developmentWriting and agreeing the specification first, then having an agent implement against it — the spec, not the code, becomes the artifact you maintain.Full definition → repositories against ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 and distilling what the highest-scoring ones did.
A majority of the 15 SDD practitioners consulted endorsed every one of the 40 practices.
In the study, repositories in the top third of specification quality spent 11.8% of commits on bug fixes versus 20.4% in the bottom third, and had a median of 4x as many contributors.
Terms in this piece · Glossary
spec-driven development — Writing and agreeing the specification first, then having an agent implement against it — the spec, not the code, becomes the artifact you maintain.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
articleSPECMINE: A Large-Scale Corpus of Spec-Driven Development ArtifactsShyam Agarwal, Bogdan Vasilescu
articleGrounding AI Agents in Contracts: An Empirical Evaluation of Spec-Driven Test GenerationMichele Tufano, James McClure, Jos\'e Cambronero, Runxiang Cheng, Sherry Y. Shi, Renyao Wei, Dorothy Chen, Franjo Ivan\v{c}i\'c, Livio Dalloro, Pat Rondon
articleA Few Pages of Markdown: Committed AI Configuration and Lower Quality Cost after Coding-Agent AdoptionYegor Denisov-Blanch, Shyam Agarwal, Pavel Azaletskiy, Hao He, Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, Bogdan Vasilescu, Sanmi Koyejo