Hindsight-Driven Development: An Iterative Approach to Building Software With AI

AI makes trying cheaper than guessing, yet spec-driven development still asks you to guess first. Meet Hindsight-Driven Development.

Still writing the spec. The product is already done.

You spend two hours writing a detailed spec for a feature. An AI coding agent builds it in ten minutes. You try it, and within a minute you see what the spec got wrong.

In those same two hours, you could have built it, tried it, thrown away three versions, and kept the fourth.

Specs force us to make our most detailed decisions at the moment we know the least.

For decades, that was a fair trade. Building was expensive, so we paid to describe software first.

AI broke that trade. Yet a popular response to AI coding agents is spec-driven development. Tools like GitHub’s Spec Kit and Amazon’s Kiro have you write and sign off on requirements, a design, and a...

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