Three approaches. One works for me
Vibe coding — a free-flow approach: you provide an idea, the AI generates code, you tweak it, generate more. Fast start. After a week, you’re sitting in code you don’t understand, and with every new session the AI asks, “remind me about the project”.
Agile — sprints, backlog, user stories. A strong framework for teams. For a single person with a product background rather than a programming one, it’s another layer to manage before anything useful is built.
Spec-Driven Development with Spec Kit from GitHub — the order reversed. Specification first. Code second. The specification isn’t a document you write once and forget — it’s a living artefact the AI uses as context in every session.
What I did before writing the first line of code
Over the past few weeks — step by step, session by session — I've built something I’d never had before when thinking about creating an MVP:
constitution.md — a document of product and technical principles that is non-negotiable. Before a single line of AI-assisted code is written, Claude Code checks nine principles. My product philosophy is a gate, not a wish;
spec — six user stories with acceptance criteria and measurable success thresholds. Not “the user can log in”, but “the user can complete the full flow within time X, on connection Y, with outcome Z”;
plan + eight technical contracts — architecture, API schemas, database security policies, data model — all defined before a single .ts file existed;
88 tasks across nine phases, all dependency-ordered; every day I know exactly what I’m doing: T001, T002, T003. No hesitation. No paralysis.
What this changes for a beginner developer
Until now, my motivation when building a product solo tended to fade not due to a lack of ideas, but due to a lack of structure and a sense of progress. Spec Kit brings three important things to the project:
context across sessions — Claude Code knows what is being built without re-explaining it from scratch;
a sense of progress without code — every iteration of the constitution, every approved spec, every generated contract — it’s real progress. Visible, measurable, commit-ready;
confidence in your own decisions — once a principle is written in the constitution and validated by AI, you can stop questioning it every other day. You can build step by step.
And the next step is T001. Monorepo. The first commit with code. Yet already I have something more important than code — a project that knows what it is before it exists.
Spec Kit is open source: github.com/github/spec-kit
I’m building a digital product around specialty coffee. The process will be documented.
Photo: Chen Zy, Unsplash