What is Spec Driven Development (SDD) with AI?
Spec Driven Development is a software engineering methodology where detailed, structured specifications serve as the primary source of truth, guiding AI coding agents to generate code, tests, and …
Roger Perkin Network Automation Consultant
Covering all things Network Automation & AI
Spec Driven Development
Spec Driven Development for Network Engineers
AI coding agents like Claude Code can now write Ansible playbooks, Python scripts and Terraform modules in minutes. The problem is that without clear direction, they guess. Spec driven development fixes that. Instead of prompting your way to working code, you start by writing a specification that captures what you want to build, the constraints it has to work within and how you’ll know it’s correct. The AI then plans, breaks the work into tasks and implements against that spec.
For network engineers, this is a natural fit. We already think in terms of intent, design documents and change requests. A good spec is simply network intent written down in a way both humans and AI agents can follow, and it brings the same discipline to automation that a change window brings to production.
In this series I’ll show you how to apply spec driven development to real network automation work, from writing your first spec through to hands-on builds with GitHub Spec Kit and Claude Code, all tested against lab environments before anything touches production.
New to the topic? Start here: What is Spec Driven Development?