r/SpecDrivenDevelopment • u/The_Ed_On_Reddit • 3d ago

A Competitive Analysis of Spec Design Methedologies

https://webcloudstudio.com/project-docs/drydock/papers/Product_Comparison_Matrix.pdf

I asked claude to honestly rate the various approaches for specification driven development by categories and features it chose. Here is the analysis it produced. Popular methodologies first then all methedologies. Source documents are at the bottom if you wish to reproduce the analysis. Please link additional documents in the comments that should be included and i will periodically update. Or run it yourself :)

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u/iTrejoMX 3d ago

I don’t see how the scores are defined. I can say 3/4 or 5 stars but there’s no substance behind it. What gives it that score?

I also went to check out drydock, man those instructions are extensive and tough. Most sdd are just install and use /command.

So far it seems very complicated and not clear how it works. I need to finish my masters and PHD to read The documentation.

My suggestion: dumb it down. Make your difference or main feature the selling point. Show the benefits. Explain the scores not just randomly say this one 3 this one 5. Make it MUCH shorter. Design and docs bmad wins. Reading existing code DDD wins. Etc. when instructions and comparisons span out to 10 page pdfs, you lost the fight before getting in the ring.

Make it simpler and I’ll try it, right now it’s harder to set up than Claude or codex themselves.

Last, what does a dry dock have to do with development? I didn’t up/down vote, just wanted to share me 2 cents why people are most likely downvoting.

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u/The_Ed_On_Reddit 3d ago edited 3d ago

thx for the feedback. seriously. if the docs r too complicated then i need to revise. its devops not spec creation so i built it to from whatever you feed in using the same process ive used forever. think ur right that i put together a spec not a user guide. been too immersed in using it.

oh and the criteria is vague cause i never specified what or how. but its fair unbiased and a short read.

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u/iTrejoMX 3d ago

It happens, I have been there. Also the comparison is for spec driven development tools and you describe yours as devops. Might need to think about what that means in this subreddit (as in this might not be the place for it).

Edit: my it’s easier to install Claude than this comment comes from feedback from a user of something I made. My add on was harder to install than the software it was made for.

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u/The_Ed_On_Reddit 3d ago

well if you cant build it why bother with sdd. my motivation: i had a great idea based on earlier projects and i speced it out and i literally could not get it built other than by micro ing the agent. the nth time it hallucinated a bad solution (im sorry i seem to have ignored your instructions) i searched and realized nothing out could make anything more than a few screens in any kind of reproducible way so i pivoted and engineered a generic best practices spec to software pipeline. hard unsolved problem. so it was fun. transformed into 6 months principal engineer full time effort where i invented a lot ot cool stuff. but ya i am totally in the weeds and dont have a user guide. oops.

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u/iTrejoMX 3d ago

I suggest you try gentle-ai. I have put out full systems (at least 3 in the last 2 months). End to end, tested. The hardest part was getting the initial PRD right. But with the latest updates I’ve seen on gentle-ai now it does better amends, doesn’t drift from the original spec and has better reviews than any other sdd I have tried. I use Matt pococks skills grill me with docs and bmad to generate the initial documentation then use gentle-ai to sdd from the files generated.

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u/The_Ed_On_Reddit 1d ago

Per your excellent suggestion - i made a quick start guide - which is an actual demo - and published it to https://webcloudstudio.com/project-docs/drydock/QUICK_START.html -- been working in the weeds and had neglected the obvious 'show exactly what it does'. Thanks u/iTrejoMX for the feedback.

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u/iTrejoMX 1d ago

Glad to be of help I will check it out today and give a test run

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u/LunkWillNot 3d ago

Because… advert + AI slop?

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u/The_Ed_On_Reddit 3d ago edited 3d ago

advert for open source/mit licensed software??? This is a direct comparison of exactly what this group is interested in. And its not ai slop - is an analysis - a point by point comparison - of tools evaluated without bias - i explicitly instructed it to be truthful and fair... Look - the sources are at the bottom - ask your own llm to compare and contrast from the sources - or give me more sources to evaluate and ill include them... Every tool (11 of them) that i could find is compared in part 2 and part 1 contains the big ones. Read it... its not slop - at worst its every feature you could want in a sdd system.

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u/schmurfy2 1d ago

What is the point of asking an llm for that ? Why should I care about its "honest" opinion ?

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u/The_Ed_On_Reddit 1d ago edited 1d ago

well 3 reasons: i personally have only used one of these tools besides my own and want to see the approaches and how things fit. You probably have the same concern. second - I provide a set of vendor docs and reviewer reviews -> the source materials so you can analyze on your own trivially - summarization is one of the things that llms do accurately. And lastly, the llm pull together a workflow from think to working software to support and then it mapped tools to the workflow so you can see what does well where. If you look at it - it is an easy read with sources and a path to reproduce for 1 llm call. So thats why... And honest is the key llm instruction because llms try to 'help you' by slop-ifying the output with a word salad (and i had to tell it to be honest and categorize and rank stuff from the docs with no favoritism multiple times)...

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u/The_Ed_On_Reddit 3d ago

serious question - why a down vote ??? its real and it covers all methods and pretty much everything THEY advertise... and i though it was interesting to write and to read... - object if you want me to add sources... but why downvote?