Subhash Kovela

As AI-assisted software engineering evolves beyond interactive chat and ad-hoc prompting into context engineering, Spec-Driven Development (SDD) has emerged as a crucial discipline for generating predictable, production-ready code. However, moving from theory to implementation presents real challenges: Which spec frameworks actually hold up in practice? And how to adapt to a particular organization's coding best practices without overloading the context?

In this talk, we examine three primary Opensource SDD frameworks: BMAD, OpenSpec, and SpecKit. The speaker will walk through workflows to evaluate how each framework structures specs, handles edge cases, and manages execution. Additionally, we’ll analyze the trade-offs of using enriched context vs. lean context, highlighting where additional context sharply reduces hallucination and where it simply adds noise or degrades performance.