Writing code
is not the bottleneck.
Code generation became the commodity in the middle. The work moved to the edges — communicating intent upstream, verifying output downstream. Six essays on what that does to user stories, specs, and the practice of building software.
Reading order · six essays
01 ESSAY
The Spectrum
Four schools of agentic coding, from vibe coding to agentic orchestration — and why the discipline now lives in the harness, not the code.
02 ESSAY
User Stories, the Discipline
The traditional baseline: 3 C's, INVEST, vertical slicing — and the semantic diffusion that hollowed the vocabulary out.
03 ESSAY
Stories Meet the Machines
AI across the story lifecycle — as enforcer of INVEST, as adversarial analyst, and as the thing that changes who the story is written for.
04 ESSAY
SDD vs. the Agile Baseline
Spec-driven development against the Thoughtworks sensible defaults: compatible, conditionally — iterative waterfall in the small, agile in the large.
05 ESSAY
The Spec as Source of Truth
The maximalist position — if the code doesn't match the spec, the code is broken — and the correction mid-2026 forced on it.
06 ESSAY
Synthesis
Seven theses that survive all five essays, and the problems nobody has solved yet.