2 posts tagged with "engineering-practice"

Someone posted spec-driven development on LinkedIn this week as the answer to vibe coding — to prompting an agent, half-understanding what you're building, and ending up with code you can't vouch for. The linked toolkit has 127,000 stars and comes from GitHub itself. The pitch lands.

So I installed it and pointed it at a deliberately trivial task. One of the three principles it wrote for me was a dependency policy I never asked for — hold that thought.

Twenty minutes isn't a verdict, though. Two engineers have tested this properly, on real problems, long enough for the seams to show. They used different tools, on different continents, seven months apart — and both reached for the same comparison, unprompted: the last time our industry tried to generate working code from documents. On the one question that decides whether any of this survives contact with AI features, they flatly contradict each other. Neither has a measurement.

In June 2026, the AI world got a new buzzword: loop engineering — roughly, disciplined design of a single agent's tool-calling loop. Six weeks later it was supposedly replaced by graph engineering — wiring up several agents at once — killed by twelve words that 3.1 million people saw:

Don't know what loop engineering is? Don't worry — neither did most of the people declaring it dead. Here are both terms, how a name became an obituary in six weeks, and the twist nobody checked before writing about it.