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Discussion on: Breaking the doom-prompting loop with spec-driven development

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Alex Bunardzic

Can someone please explain to me how Spec-Driven Development is not waterfall?

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Vincent Burckhardt

SDD and waterfall both require comprehensive documentation before implementation. The key difference is that waterfall spans months/years, whereas SDD completes feature cycle in hours/days. Waterfall governs entire project lifecycles while SDD operate at individual feature level (toolkit like spec-kit actually creates a new feature branch as part of the specify step). An additional aspect is that waterfall is typically inflexible , backtracking is expensive, while SDD enables rapid iterations by adjusting specifications and regenerating / updating the code.