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Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system

• openclaw01 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• dfltr 6mo ago
  GSD has a reputation for being a token burner compared to something like Superpowers. Has that changed lately? Always open to revisiting things as they improve.
• spaceman_2020 6mo ago
  I’ve been using GSD for all my dev projects Honestly a fantastic harness right out of the box. Give it a good spec and it can easily walk you through fairly complex apps
• prakashrj 6mo ago
  With GSD, I was able to write 250K lines of code in less than a month, without prior knowledge of claude.
  • rsoto2 6mo ago
    I could copy 250k lines from github. Faster than using ai. Cheaper. Code is better tested/more secure. I can learn/build with other humans.
    • prakashrj 6mo ago
      This is how I test my code currently. 1. Backend unit tests — fast in-memory tests that run the full suite in ~5 seconds on every save. 2. Full end-to-end tests — automated UI tests that spin up a real cloud server, run through the entire user journey (provision → connect → manage → teardown), and verify the app behaves correctly on all supported platforms (phone, tablet, desktop). 3. Screenshot regression tests — every E2E run captures named screenshots and diffs them against saved baselines. Any unintended UI change gets caught automatically.
      • indigodaddy 6mo ago
        Check out exe.dev/Shelley web agent it facilitates much of what you describe by default.
        • dominotw 6mo ago
          yea i am not going to checkout your shitty vibecoded project. Can we pls stop this.
          • indigodaddy 6mo ago
            Lol, not my project, and you shouldn't make assumptions, you have no clue what you are talking about
      • rsoto2 6mo ago
        sounds like your only measure of good tests is how quickly the llm can produce and run them. not a good metric. LOL screenshot regression. You're still not a dev buddy read some books
    • prakashrj 6mo ago
      I was not a app developer before, but a systems engineer with devops experience. But I learnt a lot about apple development, app store connect and essential became a app developer in a month. I don't think I can learn so quickly with other humans help.
      • 0x696C6961 6mo ago
        If you lost access to AI would you be able to continue development on your app?
        • prakashrj 6mo ago
          Goal is to build something that will have value. Once it has value, I can hire a team or open source it, if AI ceases to exist in this world.
      • icedchai 6mo ago
        You might be surprised. In 2008, when the App Store first came out, I became an iPhone app developer after reading one book. I already knew C, so Objective C wasn't a big leap. Between my own apps and consulting work, I had a pretty good side business. Like everything else though, those days didn't last forever. But there was a lot of easy money early on.
  • wslh 6mo ago
    250K? Could you expand your experience with details about your project and the lessons and issues you found?
    • prakashrj 6mo ago
      A self-hosted VPN server manager: a TypeScript/Hono backend that runs on your own VPS, paired with a SwiftUI iOS/macOS app. It lets you provision cloud servers across multiple providers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr), manage them via a Tailscale-secured connection with TLS pinning, and control an OpenClaw gateway. I will open source it soon in few weeks, as I have still complete few more features.
      • tkiolp4 6mo ago
        Please don’t.
        • prakashrj 6mo ago
          It's good advice. I will only open source, if it has utility.
        • toastal 6mo ago
          Please do. Poison the training.
      • icedchai 6mo ago
        This does not feel like 250K lines of complexity. Have you looked at any of the code at all? You likely have mass duplication, copy-pasta everywhere.
        • prakashrj 6mo ago
          I didn't look at code. In addition to code, I have CI and CD built in. I becomes hard add features after a while, if you cannot have built in CI/CD that will catch regression.
  • dominotw 6mo ago
    yes vibecoding is fun.
  • tkiolp4 6mo ago
    That sounds awful. I got a promotion once for deleting 250K lines of code in less than a month. Now that sounds better
    • prakashrj 6mo ago
      I get it now. Hopefully the utility of it will eventually bring some value. Maybe Utility and corresponding LOC should help you assess my work. Since I didn't share what I have, I can see people getting alarmed at 250K lines of code.
• MeetingsBrowser 6mo ago
  I've tried it, and I'm not convinced I got measurably better results than just prompting claude code directly. It absolutely tore through tokens though. I don't normally hit my session limits, but hit the 5-hour limits in ~30 minutes and my weekly limits by Tuesday with GSD.
  • testycool 6mo ago
    Same experience on multiple occasions.
• greenchair 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • maxbond 6mo ago
    Nah it's entirely possible a project with a name like this starts to get traction and then changes it's name to Get Stuff Done to go mainstream. Honestly it could be an asset to getting traction with a "move fast and break things" audience. It adds texture and a name change adds lore.
• obsidianbases1 6mo ago
  > If you know clearly what you want This is the real challenge. The people I know that jump around to new tools have a tough time explaining what they want, and thus how new tool is better than last tool.
  • boringg 6mo ago
    What do you think drives the tooling ecosystem aside from VC dollars?
    • jauntywundrkind 6mo ago
      These are incredible new superpowers. The LLMs let us do far far more than we could before. But it creates information glut, doesn't come with in built guards to prevent devolution from setting in. It feels unsurprising but also notable that a third of what folks are suddenly building is harness/prompting/coordination systems, because it's all trying to adapt & figure out process shapes for using these new superpowers well in. There's some VC money interest but I'd classify more than 9 / 10ths of it as good old fashioned wildcat open source interest. Because it's fascinating and amazing, because it helps us direct our attention & steer our works. And also it's so much more approachable and interesting, now that it's all tmux terminal stuff. It's so much more direct & hackable than, say, wading into vscode extension building, deep in someone else's brambly thicket of APIs, and where the skeleton is already in place anyhow, where you are only grafting little panes onto the experience rather than recasting the experience. The devs suddenly don't need or care for or want that monolithic big UI, and have new soaring freedom to explore something much nearer to them, much more direct, and much more malleable: the terminal. There's so many different forms of this happening all at once. Totally different topic, but still in the same broad area, submitted just now too: Horizon, an infinite canvas for trrminals/AI work. https://github.com/peters/horizon https://github.com/peters/horizon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47416227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47416227
• maccam912 6mo ago
  I've had a good experience with https://github.com/obra/superpowers https://github.com/obra/superpowers. At first glance this looks similar. Has anyone tried both who can offer a comparison?
  • observationist 6mo ago
    It's one of those things where having a structure is really helpful - I've used some similar prompt scaffolds, and the difference is very noticeable. Another great technique is to use one of these structures in a repo, then task your AI with overhauling the framework using best practices for whatever your target project is. It works great for creative writing, humanizing, songwriting, technical/scientific domains, and so on. In conjunction with agents, these are excellent to have. I think they're going to be a temporary thing - a hack that boosts utility for a few model releases until there's sufficient successful use cases in the training data that models can just do this sort of thing really well without all the extra prompting. These are fun to use.
  • yolonir 6mo ago
    I've used both From my experience, gsd is a highly overengineered piece of software that unfortunately does not get shit done, burns limits and takes ages while doing so. Quick mode does not really help because it kills the point of gsd, you can't build full software on ad-hocs. I've used plain markdown planning before, but it was limiting and not very stable, superpowers looks like a good middleground
    • dmix 6mo ago
      My instinct is to blame these agent frameworks as well but at some point we have to start blaming Claude or Claude Code for engaging in these endless planning loops which burn tokens with no regard. The future of these coding models will eventually need to start factoring in how to use and engage with these skills more competently (assuming that's possible and they aren't always just aimless yesmen).
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
• gbrindisi 6mo ago
  I like openspec, it lets you tune the workflow to your liking and doesn’t get in the way. I started with all the standard spec flow and as I got more confident and opinionated I simplified it to my liking. I think the point of any spec driven framework is that you want to eventually own the workflow yourself, so that you can constraint code generation on your own terms.
  • alasano 6mo ago
    I also like openspec. I think these type of systems (gsd/superpowers) are way too opinionated. It's not that they can't or don't work. I just think that the best way to truly stay on top of the crazy pace of changes is to not attach yourself to super opinionated workflows like these. I'm building an orchestrator library on top of openspec for that reason.
    • gbrindisi 6mo ago
      I am doing something similar: I use openspec to create context and a sequential task list that I feed to ralph loops, so that i’m involved for the planning and the verification step but completely hands off the wheel during code generation.
      • alasano 6mo ago
        Exactly that. I created an "Open Ralph" loop initially within Claude directly with review gates per phase in the OpenSpec task list. But it was always just a workaround to what I truly wanted (what I'm building now), a full external managed orchestrator loop. The agents aren't aware of the loop, they don't need to be.
• yoaviram 6mo ago
  I've been using GSD extensively over the past 3 months. I previously used speckit, which I found lacking. GSD consistently gets me 95% of the way there on complex tasks. That's amazing. The last 5% is mostly "manual" testing. We've used GSD to build and launch a SaaS product including an agent-first CMS (whiteboar.it). It's hard to say why GSD worked so much better for us than other similar frameworks, because the underlying models also improved considerably during the same period. What is clear is that it's a huge productivity boost over vanilla Claude Code.
  • unstatusthequo 6mo ago
    Same. Have had great results with it. I got sick of paying FreshBooks monthly for basic income/expense tracking for Schedule C reporting and used GSD to build a macOS Swift app with Codex 5.4 and Opus 4.6. It’s working great and I am considering releasing it on the App Store. It started as a web app, but then I wanted screen capture from other windows for receipts in email or whatever. Then I wanted physical receipts, and so used Apple continuity camera. All working now in my app. And, I just added receipt auto-extract to pull salient info from and determine deduction category using Anthropic API. Yes this is how much paying FreshBooks annoyed me. Plus I hated they forced an emailed 2FA if you didn’t connect with Google.
    • wg0 6mo ago
      How much feature complete it is compared to Freshbooks? Also, how much it is in terms of cost? Like - API costs? Is it pure Swift? Or Electron app?
  • gercius 6mo ago
    Your site whiteboar.it doesn't load properly on visit and on refresh, had to click on one of the footer links for it to somehow load. Terrible first impression. I can email you video if you want.
• gtirloni 6mo ago
  I was using this and superpowers but eventually, Plan mode became enough and I prefer to steer Claude Code myself. These frameworks are great for fire-and-forget tasks, especially when there is some research involved but they burn 10x more tokens, in my experience. I was always hitting the Max plan limits for no discernable benefit in the outcomes I was getting. But this will vary a lot depending on how people prefer to work.
  • jghn 6mo ago
    I've gone the other way recently, shifting from pure plan mode to superpowers. I was reminded of it due to the announcement of the latest version. It is perhaps confirmation bias on my part but I've been finding it's doing a better job with similar problems than I was getting with base plan mode. I've been attributing this to its multiple layers of cross checks and self-reviews. Yes, I could do that by hand of course, but I find superpowers is automating what I was already trying to accomplish in this regard.
    • gtirloni 6mo ago
      Yes, it does help in that way. Maybe I'm still struggling to let go and let AI take the wheel from beginning to end but I enjoy the exploratory part of the whole process (investigating possible solutions, trying theories, doing little spikes, etc, all with CC's assistance). When it's time to actually code, I just let it do its own thing mostly unsupervised. I do spend quite a lot of time on spec writing.
      • jghn 6mo ago
        That’s part of what I’ve liked about it over plan mode. Again not a scientific measurement but I feel it’s better at interactive brainstorming and researching the big picture with me. And it’s built in multiple checkpoints also give me more space to pivot or course correct.
  • hatmanstack 6mo ago
    Why are we using cli wrappers if you're using Claude Code? I get if you need something like Codex but they released sub agents today so maybe not even that, but it's an unnecessary wrapper for Claude Code.
• Andrei_dev 6mo ago
  250K lines in a month — okay, but what does review actually look like at that volume? I've been poking at security issues in AI-generated repos and it's the same thing: more generation means less review. Not just logic — checking what's in your .env, whether API routes have auth middleware, whether debug endpoints made it to prod. You can move that fast. But "review" means something different now. Humans make human mistakes. AI writes clean-looking code that ships with hardcoded credentials because some template had them and nobody caught it. All these frameworks are racing to generate faster. Nobody's solving the verification side at that speed.
  • torben-friis 6mo ago
    Code is a cost. It seems everyone's forgotten. Saying "I generated 250k lines" is like saying "I used 2500 gallons of gas". Cool, nice expense, but where did you get? Because it it's three miles, you're just burning money. 250k lines is roughly SQLite or Redis in project size. Do you have SQLite-maintaining money? Did you get as far as Redis did in outcomes?
    • prakashrj 6mo ago
      Openclaw was mostly build by AI. It had 400K lines of code.
      • sarchertech 6mo ago
        You didn’t answer what does you 250k lines do? How much money does it make? How many users does it have?
        • knes 6mo ago
          what if you move from reviewing the code to reviewing the spec?
          • sarchertech 6mo ago
            That’s like asking why don’t we switch from reviewing PRs to reviewing jira tickets. There’s probably a world where you could do that if the spec was written in a formal language with no ambiguity and there was a rigorous system for translating from spec to code sure.
• dhorthy 6mo ago
  it is very hard for me to take seriously any system that is not proven for shipping production code in complex codebases that have been around for a while. I've been down the "don't read the code" path and I can say it leads nowhere good. I am perhaps talking my own book here, but I'd like to see more tools that brag about "shipped N real features to production" or "solved Y problem in large-10-year-old-codebase" I'm not saying that coding agents can't do these things and such tools don't exist, I'm just afraid that counting 100k+ LOC that the author didn't read kind of fuels the "this is all hype-slop" argument rather than helping people discover the ways that coding agents can solve real and valuable problems.
  • knes 6mo ago
    Agreed.this paper studied 33k+ agent-authored PRs on GitHub (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15195 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.15195) #1 rejection reason: missing context. 80% needed human fixes. Agents can write code fine. They just don't know what "done" looks like in your codebase. Count successful merges into repos with real history instead of LOC and the hard part is specification, not execution. Wrote about this topic @ https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/the-end-of-linear-work https://www.augmentcode.com/blog/the-end-of-linear-work
• arjie 6mo ago
  I could not produce useful output from this. It was useful as a rubber duck because it asks good motivating questions during the plan phase, but the actual implementation was lacklustre and not worth the effort. In the end, I just have Claude Opus create plans, and then I have it write them to memory and update it as it goes along and the output is better.
  • hatmanstack 6mo ago
    No brother, the Claude plans aren't the right path, they're for hobbyists.
    • arjie 6mo ago
      Okay, I'll give these another shot. Perhaps I just haven't figured out how to use them right.
      • hatmanstack 6mo ago
        I don't know brother, I don't use them, they may be great they may suck. What I've found is that adding peripherals always creates more problems. If you aren't using Claude for professional work then just sticking with the factory plan mode probably works. If not, look into creating your own Claude skills, try to understand how prompt pipelines work and it will unlock a ton of automation for you. Not just for coding.
        • arjie 6mo ago
          I do use Claude for professional work, but I suspect I don't know enough to be able to get anything useful out of your advice since I don't know how to add my own Claude skills that form a prompt pipeline without adding peripherals. I'll just have to catch this part of the whole thing as a late adopter, I suppose. Ah well, thanks for the help.
          • hatmanstack 6mo ago
• thr0waway001 6mo ago
  At the risk of sounding stupid what does the author mean by: “I’m not a 50-person software company. I don’t want to play enterprise theatre.” ?
  • bobtheborg 6mo ago
    The author of that page seems to mostly be AI, not a human.
  • saaaaaam 6mo ago
    No idea but doesn’t it sound GREAT and filled with portentous meaning? Don’t be an enterprise clown! Be a gutsy hustle guy like me! Down with enterprise theatre, long live the vibe jam!
  • jdthedisciple 6mo ago
    Seems fairly obvious: Some agent harnesses play enterprise theater by creating jira-type tickets for you and moving them around silly swim lanes, instead of, of course, just simply getting sh!t done.
    • thr0waway001 6mo ago
      Wasn’t obvious to me so I asked. But I guess if I go by what you’re saying I suppose it makes sense for it not to do a bunch of things you didn’t ask it to do.
• ibrahim_h 6mo ago
  The README recommends --dangerously-skip-permissions as the intended workflow. Looking at gsd-executor.md you can see why — subagents run node gsd-tools.cjs, git checkout -b, eslint, test runners, all generated dynamically by the planner. Approving each one kills autonomous mode. There is a gsd-plan-checker that runs before execution, but it only verifies logical completeness — requirement coverage, dependency graphs, context budget. It never looks at what commands will actually run. So if the planner generates something destructive, the plan-checker won't catch it because that's not what it checks for. The gsd-verifier runs after execution, checking whether the goal was achieved, not whether anything bad happened along the way. In /gsd:autonomous this chains across all remaining phases unattended. The granular permissions fallback in the README only covers safe reads and git ops — but the executor needs way more than that to actually function. Feels like there should be a permission profile scoped to what GSD actually needs without going full skip.
  • deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  • CloakHQ 6mo ago
    [dead]
• tkiolp4 6mo ago
  The whole gsd/agents folder is hilarious. Like a bunch of MD that never breaks. How do you is it minimally correct? Subjective prose. Sad to see this on the frontpage
• jankhg 6mo ago
  Apart from GSD and superpowers, there's another system, called PAUL [1]. It apparently requires fewer tokens compared to GSD, as it does not use subagents, but keeps all in one session. A detailed comparison with GSD is part of the repo [2]. [1] https://github.com/ChristopherKahler/paul https://github.com/ChristopherKahler/paul [2] https://github.com/ChristopherKahler/paul/blob/main/PAUL-VS-GSD.md https://github.com/ChristopherKahler/paul/blob/main/PAUL-VS-...
  • prakashrj 6mo ago
    Would love to migrate from GSD and try, if there is community around it.
• jatora 6mo ago
  Another heavily overengineered AND underengineered abomination. I'm convinced anyone who advocates for these types of tools would find just as much success just prompting claude code normally and taking a little bit to plan first. Such a waste of time to bother with these tools that solve a problem that never existed in the first place.
• DamienB 6mo ago
  I've compared this to superpowers and the classic prd->task generator. And I came away convinced that less is more. At least at the moment. gsd performed well, but took hours instead of minutes. Having a simple explanation of how to create a PRD followed by a slightly more technical task list performed much better. It wasn't that grd or superpowers couldn't find a solution, it's just that they did it much slower and with a lot more help. For me, the lesson was that the workflow has changed, and we that we can't apply old project-dev paradigms to this new/alien technology. There's a new instruction manual and it doesn't build on the old one.
• chrisss395 6mo ago
  I'm curious if anyone has used this (or similar) to build a production system? I'm facing increasing pressure from senior executives who think we can avoid the $$$ B2B SaaS by using AI to vibe code a custom solution. I love the idea of experimenting with this but am horrified by the first-ever-case being a production system that is critical to the annual strategic plan. :-/
  • prakashrj 6mo ago
    I would love to take up that challenge. With what I have learnt so far, I am raring to get opportunities to make custom solutions.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• recroad 6mo ago
  I use openspec and love it. I’m doing 5-7x with close to 100% of code AI generated, and shipping to production multiple times a day. I work on a large sass app with hundreds of customers. Wrote something here: https://zarar.dev/spec-driven-development-from-vibe-coding-to-structured-development/ https://zarar.dev/spec-driven-development-from-vibe-coding-t...
  • sarchertech 6mo ago
    >large sass app >hundreds of customers
    • recroad 6mo ago
      Large codebase. Yeah man, I have a small business, trying to grow but not easy going up against Ticketmaster.
      • sarchertech 6mo ago
        A ticketmaster competitor doesn’t sound like a huge technical challenge unless you’re operating at scale. So my first question would be why do you have a large codebase so with so few customers?
        • duskdozer 6mo ago
          He's 5-7xing code output with the help of ~100% AI. More lines. More vibes. More velocity. Rocketship emoji.
          • recroad 6mo ago
            Less vibes. In SDD you have to meticulously review your specs.
            • _se 6mo ago
              Really, REALLY make no mistakes!!!
• melvinroest 6mo ago
  If you want some context about spec-driven development and how it could be used with LLMs I recommend [1]. Having some background like helps me to understand tools like this a bit more. [1] https://www.riaanzoetmulder.com/articles/ai-assisted-programming-project-setup/ https://www.riaanzoetmulder.com/articles/ai-assisted-program...
• theodorewiles 6mo ago
  I think the research / plan / execute idea is good but feels like you would be outsourcing your thinking. Gotta review the plan and spend your own thinking tokens!
• galexyending 6mo ago
  I gave it a shot, but won't be using it going forward. It requires a waterfall process. And, I found it difficult, and in some cases impossible, to adjust phases/plans when bugs or changes in features arise. The execution prompts didn't do a good job of steering the code to be verified while coding and relies on the user to manually test at the end of each phase.
• seneca 6mo ago
  I've tried several of these sorts of things, and I keep coming away with the feeling that they are a lot of ceremony and complication for not much value. I appreciate that people are experimenting with how to work with AI and get actual value, but I think pretty much all of these approaches are adding complexity without much, or often any, gain. That's not a reason to stop trying. This is the iterative process of figuring out what works.
• Frannky 6mo ago
  I tried it once; it was incredibly verbose, generating an insane amount of files. I stopped using it because I was worried it would not be possible to rapidly, cheaply, and robustly update things as interaction with users generated new requirements. The best way I have today is to start with a project requirements document and then ask for a step-by-step implementation plan, and then go do the thing at each step but only after I greenlight the strategy of the current step. I also specify minimal, modular, and functional stateless code.
• loveparade 6mo ago
  "I am a super productive person that just wants to get shit done" Looked at profile, hasn't done or published anything interesting other than promoting products to "get stuff done" This is like the TODO list book gurus writing about productivity
  • cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • dasil003 6mo ago
    Looking for 5 seconds at the github profile I see a bunch of music-related stuff, and also a bunch of contributions to private repos that we have no idea what they are. I get the productivity guru anti-pattern, but I honestly don't know what you're looking at that merits this kind of reflexive personal attack.
• yoavsha1 6mo ago
  How come we have all these benchmarks for models, but none whatsoever for harnesses / whatever you'd call this? While I understand assigning "scores" is more nuanced, I'd love to see some website that has a catalog of prompts and outputs as produced with a different configuration of model+harness in a single attepmt
• smusamashah 6mo ago
  There should be an "Examples" section in projects like this one to show what has actually been made using it. I scrolled to the end and was really expecting an example the way it's being advertised. If it was game engine or new web framework for example there would be demos or example projects linked somewhere.
• hermanzegerman 6mo ago
  For me it was awesome. I needed a custom Pipeline for Preprocessing some Lab Data, including Visualization and Manipulation and it got me exactly what I wanted, as opposed to Codex Plan Mode, which just burned my weekly quota and produced Garbage
• Relisora 6mo ago
  Did anyone compare it with everything-claude-code (ECC)?
• DIVx0 6mo ago
  I’ve tried GSD several times. I actually like the verbosity and it’s a simple chore for Claude to refresh project docs from GSD planning docs. Like most spec driven development tools, GSD works well for greenfield or first few rounds of “compound engineering.” However, like all others, the project gets too big and GSD can’t manage to deliver working code reliably. Agents working GSD plans will start leaving orphans all over, it won’t wire them up properly because verification stages use simple lexical tools to search code for implementation facts. I tried giving GSD some ast aware tools but good luck getting Claude to reliably use them. Ultimately I put GSD back on the shelf and developed my own “property graph” based planner that is closer to Claude “plan mode” but the design SOT is structured properties and not markdown. My system will generate docs from the graph as user docs. Agents only get tasked as my “graph” closes nodes and re-sorts around invariants, then agents are tasked directly.
  • lifeisstillgood 6mo ago
    Can you expand on that at all (or point to some reading on how Claude plan mode works etc?) I think I have to get my head around a lot more than I think
    • DIVx0 6mo ago
      claude code (CC) plan mode: In a normal CC window hit "shift-tab" until you see "plan mode on" in the lower left hand corner of the TUI. Now all you really have to do is chat with claude about what you're thinking about building. In plan mode, claude can't edit anything and has some extra "you're an expert at planning!" prompts prepended to your initial message in plan mode. And then either when you're ready or Claude thinks the "plan" is gelling, it'll suggest stopping and let it write up a detailed plan. CC will dispatch some "planning agents" with prompts that your 'main' CC has crafted for that agent to plan for within the context of your conversation and what parts of the codebase it should look to integrate/explore. Once all that is done, it will display it to you and then offer to "clear context and implement" - where it will just get to work. Or it will offer to go back to chatting and resolve whatever was misunderstood, or if you had a new idea you wanted to mix in. These plans are saved as markdown in your .claude/plans directory. Plan mode is handy on the on-off. But if you enter another plan mode, thinking claude would learn from, or build off a previous plan spec, it won't unless you explicitly say something like "read previous plan <path to plan file> and re-use the scaffolding directives for this new project"
• AndyNemmity 6mo ago
  I have a ai system i use. I'd like to release it so others can benefit, but at the same time it's all custom to myself and what i do, and work on. If I fork out a version for others that is public, then I have to maintain that variation as well. Is anyone in a similar situation? I think most of the ones I see released are not particularly complex compraed to my system, but at the same time I don't know how to convey how to use my system as someone who just uses it alone. it feels like I don't want anyone to run my system, I just want people to point their ai system to mine and ask it what there is valuable to potentially add to their own system. I don't want to maintain one for people. I don't want to market it as some magic cure. Just show patterns that others can use.
  • canadiantim 6mo ago
    you don't have to maintain it. Especially in the age of ai, just giving people inspiration and something to vibe from is more than sufficient and appreciated
    • AndyNemmity 6mo ago
      alright. i guess i'll create a new repo, remove out a bunch of very specific pieces, and put it up. there's a lot of patterns i think are helpful for me.
      • canadiantim 6mo ago
        That would be awesome. I believe with AI it's all about tailoring everything to your specific workflow and style, especially anything to do with the dev environment.
        • AndyNemmity 6mo ago
          right, i'm having to cut out a lot of my pieces at the moment to try to get it into a release state. i have checks of which types of repos i'm in with branching dev flows for each one. it's going to be hard to communicate all of this genericly, but i am trying.
• canadiantim 6mo ago
  I use Oh-My-Opencode (Now called Oh-My-OpenAgent), but it's effectively the same as GSD, but better imo
• LoganDark 6mo ago
  This seems like something I'd want to try but I am wholly opposed to `npx` being the sole installation mechanism. Let me install it as a plugin in Claude Code. I don't want `npx` to stomp all over my home directory / system configuration for this, or auto-find directories or anything like that.
• vinnymac 6mo ago
  I tried this for a week and gave up. Required far too much back and forth. Ate too many tokens, and required too much human in the loop. For this reason I don’t think it’s actually a good name. It should be called planning-shit instead. Since that’s seemingly 80%+ of what I did while interacting with this tool. And when it came to getting things done, I didn’t need this at all, and the plans were just alright.
• jessepcc 6mo ago
  With the coding slot machine, I prefer move fast and start over if anything goes off track. Maybe the amount of token spent with several iterations is similar to using a more well planned system like GSD.
• davispeck 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• desireco42 6mo ago
  I honestly tried this a while back, unless this is something else, this was completely not very much useful thing. If I remember correctly, it created a lot of changes, spent a lot of time doing something and in the end this was all smoke and mirrors. If I would ever use something like this, I would maybe use BMad, which suffers from same issues, like Speckit and others. I don't know if they have some sponsorship with bunch of youtubers who are raving how awesome this is... without any supporting evidence. Anyhow, this is my experience. Superpowers on the other hand were quite useful so far, but I didn't use them enough to have to claim anything.
• visarga 6mo ago
  I did a similar system myself, then I run evals on it and found that the planning ceremony is mostly useless, claude can deal with simple prose, item lists, checkbox todos, anything works. The agent won't be a better coder for how you deliver your intent. But what makes a difference is running plan review and work review agent, they fix issues before and after work. Both pull their weight but the most surprising is the plan-review one. The work review judge reliably finds bugs to fix, but not as surprising in its insights. But they should run from separate subagents not main one because they need a fresh perspective. Other things that matter are 1. testing enforcement, 2. cross task project memory. My implementation for memory is a combination of capturing user messages with a hook, append only log, and keeping a compressed memory state of the project, which gets read before work and updated after each task.
• maxothex 6mo ago
  [dead]
• scuff3d 6mo ago
  Oh boy, if anyone thought productivity hacks, ultra optimized workflows, and "personal knowledge management" systems could get ridiculous, they haven't seen anything yet. This is gonna be the new thing people waste time on now instead of their NeoVim config.
• joegaebel 6mo ago
  In my view, Spec-Driven systems are doomed to fail. There's nothing that couples the english language specs you've written with the actual code and behaviour of the system - unless your agent is being insanely diligent and constantly checking if the entire system aligns with your specs. This has been solved already - automated testing. They encode behaviour of the system into executables which actually tell you if your system aligns or not. Better to encode the behaviour of your system into real, executable, scalable specs (aka automated tests), otherwise your app's behaviour is going to spiral out of control after the Nth AI generated feature. The way to ensure this actually scales with the firepower that LLMs have for writing implementation is ensure it follows a workflow where it knows how to test, it writes the tests first, and ensures that the tests actually reflect the behaviour of the system with mutation testing. I've scoped this out here [1] and here [2]. [1] https://www.joegaebel.com/articles/principled-agentic-software-development https://www.joegaebel.com/articles/principled-agentic-softwa... [2] https://github.com/JoeGaebel/outside-in-tdd-starter https://github.com/JoeGaebel/outside-in-tdd-starter
  • j45 6mo ago
    Specs see more about alignment and clarity increasing code that works, and increase the success of tests.
  • zby 6mo ago
    Spec Driven Development is a curious term - it suggests it is a kind of, or at least in the tradition of, Test Driven Development but it goes in the opposite direction!
    • sveme 6mo ago
      Don't understand this - you can go spec -> test -> implementation and establish the test loop. Bit like the v model of old, actually.
      • zby 6mo ago
        SDD is about flowing the design choices from the spec into the rest of the system. TDD was for making sure that the inevitable changes you make to the system later don't break your earlier assumptions - or at least warn that you need to change them. Personally I don't buy TDD - it might be useful sometimes - but it is kind of extreme - but in general agile methodologies were a reaction to the waterfall model of system development.
• noduerme 6mo ago
  Question for people who have spent more time than I have wrangling agents to manage other agents: I've been using a Claude Pro plan just as a code analyzer / autocomplete for a year or so. But I recently decided to try to rewrite a very large older code base I own, and set up an AI management system for it. I started this last week, after reading about paperclip.ing. But my strategy was to layer the system in a way I felt comfortable with. So I set up something that now feels a bit like a rube goldberg machine. What I did was, set up a clean box and give my Claude Pro plan root access to it. Then set up openclaw on that box, but not with root... so just in case it ran wild, I could intervene. Then have openclaw set up paperclip.ing. The openclaw is on a separate Claude API account and is already costing what seems like way too many tokens, but it does have a lot of memory now of the project, and in fairness, for the $150 I've spent, it has rewritten an enormous chunk of the code in a satisfactory way (with a lot of oversight). I do like being able to whatsapp with it - that's a huge bonus. But I feel like maybe this a pretty wasteful way of doing things. I've heard maybe I could just run openclaw through my Claude Pro plan, without paying for API usage. But I've heard that Anthropic might be shutting down that OAuth pathway. I've also heard people saying openclaw just thoroughly sucks, although I've been pretty impressed with its results. The general strategy I'm taking on this is to have Claude read the old codebase side by side with me in VSCode, then prepare documents for openclaw to act on as editor, then re-evaluate; then have openclaw produce documents for agent roles in Paperclip and evaluate them. Am I just wasting my money on all these API calls? $150 so far doesn't seem bad for the amount of refactoring I've gotten, across a database and back and front end at the same time, which I'm pretty sure Claude Pro would not have been able to handle without much more file-by-file supervision. I'm slightly afraid now to abandon the memory I've built up with openclaw and switch to a different tool. But hey, maybe I should just be doing this all on the Claude Pro CLI at this point...? Looking for some advice before I try to switch this project to a different paradigm. But I'm still testing this as a structure, and trying to figure out the costs. [Edit: I see so many people talking about these lighter-weight frameworks meant for driving an agent through a large, long-running code building task... like superpowers, GSD, etc... which to me as a solo coder sound very appealing if I were building a new project. But for taking 500k LOC and a complicated database and refactoring the whole thing into a headless version that can be run by agents, which is what I'm doing now, I'm not sure those are the right tools; but at the same time, I never heard anyone say openclaw was a great coding assistant -- all I hear about it being used for is, like, spamming Twitter or reading your email or ordering lunch for you. But I've only used it as a code-manager, not for any daily tasks, and I'm pretty impressed with its usefulness at that...]
• hexnuts 6mo ago
  You are missing one important bit. Semantic Gravity Sieves. Important data in the metadata collapses together, allowing grouped indexing. Something like a DAG allows the logic to be addressed consistently.
• bubblerme 6mo ago
  The spec-driven approach resonates. I've found that the quality of the initial context you feed to AI coding tools determines everything downstream. Vague specs produce vague code that needs constant correction. One pattern that's worked well for me: instead of writing specs manually, I extract structured architecture docs from existing systems (database schemas, API endpoints, workflow logic) and use those as the spec. The AI gets concrete field names, actual data relationships, and real business logic — not abstractions. The output quality jumps significantly compared to hand-written descriptions. The tricky part is getting that structured context in the first place. For greenfield projects it's straightforward. For migrations or rewrites of existing systems, it's the bottleneck that determines whether AI-assisted development actually saves time or just shifts the effort from coding to prompt engineering.
  • duskdozer 6mo ago
    >Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• anentropic 6mo ago
  I have been using this a lot lately and ... it's good. Sometimes annoying - you can't really fire and forget (I tend to regret skipping discussion on any complex tasks). It asks a lot of questions. But I think that's partly why the results are pretty good. The new /gsd:list-phase-assumptions command added recently has been a big help there to avoid needing a Q&A discussion on every phase - you can review and clear up any misapprehensions in one go and then tell it to plan -> execute without intervention. It burns quite a lot of tokens reading and re-reading its own planning files at various times, but it manages context effectively. Been using the Claude version mostly. Tried it in OpenCode too but is a bit buggy. They are working on a standalone version built on pi.dev https://github.com/gsd-build/gsd-2 https://github.com/gsd-build/gsd-2 ...the rationale is good I guess, but it's unfortunate that you can't then use your Claude Max credits with it as has to use API.
• coopykins 6mo ago
  There are so many of these "meta" frameworks going around. I have yet to see one that proves in any meaningful way they improve anything. I have a hard time believing they accomplish anything other than burn tokens and poison the context window with too much information. What works best IME is keeping things simple, clear and only providing the essential information for the task at hand, and iterating in manageable slices, rather than trying to one-shot complex tasks. Just Plan, Code and Verify, simple as that.
  • neebz 6mo ago
    Once the plan stage is done is it fire-and-forget for you afterwards?
  • quangtrn 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • mingyeow 6mo ago
      How does that work- mind sharing your workflow?
      • quangtrn 6mo ago
        [flagged]
  • romanovcode 6mo ago
    It's basically .vimrc/.emacs.d of the current age. These meta-frameworks are useful for the one who set them up but for another person they seem like complete garbage.
  • dboreham 6mo ago
    From my experience they are motivated by these two issues that you run into when using Claude Code (or similar tool): 1. The LLM is operating on more what you'd call "guidelines" than the rules -- it will mostly make a PR after fixing a bug, but sometimes not. It will mostly run tests after completing a fix, but sometimes not. So there's a sentiment "heck, let's write some prompt that tells it to always run tests after fixing code", etc. 2. You end up running the LLM tool against state that is in GitHub (or RCS du jour). E.g. I open a bug (issue) and type what I found that's wrong, or whatever new feature I want. Then I tell Claude to go look at issue #xx. It runs in the terminal, asks me a bunch of unnecessary permission questions, fixes the bug, then perhaps makes a PR, perhaps I have to ask for that, then I go watch CI status on the PR, come back to the terminal and tell it that CI passed so please merge (or I can ask it to watch CI and review status and merge when ready). After a while you realize that all that process could just be driven from the GitHub UI -- if there was a "have Claude work on this issue" button. No need for the terminal.
• randomthought12 6mo ago
  I tried this but it creates a lot of content inside the repository and I don't like that. I understand these tools need to organize their context somewhere to be efficient but I feel that it just pollutes my space. If multiple people work with different AI tools on the same project, they will all add their own stuff in the project and it will become messy real quick. I'll keep superpowers, claude-mem, context7 for the moment. This combination produces good results for me.
• jamesvzb 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• lemax 6mo ago
  I'm still stuck on superpowers. Can't seem to get better plans out of native claude planning - superpowers ensures I have a reviewed design that actually matches my mental model. Typical claude planning doesn't confirm assumptions sufficiently for my weak brain dumps/poorly spec'd tickets.
• btiwaree 6mo ago
  I used this for a team hackathon and it took way too much time to build understanding of the codebase, wrote too many agent transcripts and spent way too much token during generation. It also failed multiple times when either generating agent transcript or extracting things from agent transcript - once citing "The agent transcripts are too complex to extract from" - quite confounding considering it's the transcript you created. For what we were trying to build - few small sets of features - using gsd was an overkill. The idea was to get some learnings whether gsd could be useful - for our case it was a strong no. Learning for me: don't overcomplicate - write better specs, use claude plan mode, iterate.
• gverrilla 6mo ago
  Unbelievably slow, not worth it at all.
• liampulles 6mo ago
  Please stop using the term prompt engineering, context engineering, etc. to define formatting the text that we send an LLM. Its already quite debatable whether software developers should be called software engineers, but this is just ridiculous.
  • barbazoo 6mo ago
    Why?
• ricardo_lien 6mo ago
  I tried it after watching the video demo from the repo creator, and it looked quite impressive at first. And I decided to rebuild my side project with this, but after a few days I realized that it was not for me. It's way too much of a black box for me as an engineer, not a prompter.
• jcmontx 6mo ago
  My experience with this library has been underwhelming sadly. I have a better experience going raw with any cli agent
• rdtsc 6mo ago
  > GSD is designed for frictionless automation. Run Claude Code with: claude --dangerously-skip-permissions Is this supposed to run in a VM?
• paddy_m 6mo ago
  Has anything like this been built? I want a system that enforces planning, tests, and adversarial review (preferably by a different company's model). This is more for features, less for overall planning, but a similar workflow could be built for planning. 1. Prompt 2. Research 3. Plan (including the tests that will be written to verify the feature) 4. adversarial review of plan 5. implementation of tests, CI must fail on the tests 6. adversarial review verifying that the tests match with the plan 7. implementation to make the tests pass. 8. adversarial PR review of implementation I want to be able to check on the status of PRs based on how far along they are, read the plans, suggest changes, read the tests, suggest changes. I want a web UI for that, I don't want to be doing all of this in multiple terminal windows. A key feature that I want is that if a step fails, especially because of adversarial review, the whole PR branch is force pushed back to the previous state. so say #6 fails, #5 is re-invoked with the review information. Or if I come to the system and a PR is at #8, and I don't like the plan, then I make some edits to the plan (#3), the PR is reset to the git commit after the original plan, and the LLM is reinvoked with either my new plan or more likely my edits to the plan, then everything flows through again. I want to be able to sit down, tend to a bunch of issues, then come back in a couple of hours and see progress. I have a design for this of course. I haven't implemented it yet.
  • dboreham 6mo ago
    Similar ideas have been kicked around over here. One problem is that this seems like a set of features for GitHub rather than a stand-alone product (so no way to make money from it).
    • paddy_m 6mo ago
      I'm not concerned about making money from it, I just want to use it. I'd like to check to see if I'm re-inventing the wheel. I'm curious if others would like a similar experience.
• giancarlostoro 6mo ago
  Nice, I like the UI more than mine, I built a similar tool out of minor frustrations with some design choices in Beads, mine uses SQLite exclusively instead of git or hard files, been using it for all my personal projects, but havent gone back to try and refine what I have a little more. One thing a lot of these don't do that I added to mine is synching to and from GitHub. I want people to see exactly what my local tasks are, and if they need to pull one down to work on. I think the secret sauce is talk to the model about what you want first, make the plan, then when you feel good about the spec, regardless of tooling (you can even just use a simple markdown file!) you have it work on it. Since it always has a file to go back to, it can never 'forget' it just needs to remember to review the file. The more detail in the file, the more powerful the output. Tell your coding model: how you want it, what you want, and why you want it. It also helps to ask it to poke holes and raise concerns (bypass the overly agreeable nature of it so you dont waste time on things that are too complex). I love using Claude to prototype ideas that have been in my brain for years, and they wind up coming out better than I ever envisioned.
  • joshribakoff 6mo ago
    The “secret sauce”? RPI (research plan implement) is far from a secret concept. Heck, its in the official docs! Not secret. “never forgetting”? Its still a probabilistic model. You’re framing it like you discovered some secret techniques that eludes 100s of millions of users and overcame the architectural limits of the model.
• BrianFHearn 6mo ago
  [dead]
• LetsGetTechnicl 6mo ago
  Get slop done
• toastal 6mo ago
  This pile of Markdown files has the most cringe-inducing name I have seen in weeks.
  • barbazoo 6mo ago
    Having md files under "Languages" would be nice here.
  • sunnyps 6mo ago
    Surely gstack was worse, right?
  • cush 6mo ago
    fwiw GSD is a pretty well-established decision-making framework. The creator didn’t invent it
• BTAQA 6mo ago
  Built my first SaaS as a frontend dev with no backend experience using a similar approach. The key shift was treating Claude Code as a senior developer who needs clear specs, not a magic box. The more precise the context and requirements, the better the output. Vague prompts produce vague code.
• justacatbot 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• OpenDQV 6mo ago
  I haven't read everything in here but think this will be very useful going forwards. love the name btw! GSD!
• Heer_J 6mo ago
  [dead]
• notepad0x90 6mo ago
  if you want to charge for this, or even if you don't and you want people in old & boring companies to use it, imagine a developer or engineer having this conversation with management/bureaucrats: "I want to use 'get shit done' as part of my project" These days, it's not a big deal at all at most places. But there are places where it will raise an eye brow. I'm not saying change it's name, and you've probably considered this already, but I would like to suggest the meaning of GSD tongue-in-cheek perhaps? Whatever, a kick-ass project either way.
• soorya3 6mo ago
  The only tool you need is the one that saves tokens... the one that saves tokens ... the one that saves tokens. Currently I don't know any. Claude code itself consumes lot of tokens when not needed. I have to steer it a lot while building large applications.
  • redmattred 6mo ago
    Here's one: https://www.rtk-ai.app/ https://www.rtk-ai.app/ (https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk https://github.com/rtk-ai/rtk)
• jdwyah 6mo ago
  I used GSD for a bit. It was helpful for a side project where I constantly forgot where I was in implementation. Helpful to be able to just say "Do the next thing" I would imagine that for a non-engineer trying to code it would be quite useful / deliver a better result / less liable to end up in total mess. But for experienced engineers it quickly felt like overkill / claude itself just gets better and better. Particularly once we got agent swarms I left GSD and don't think I'll be back. But I would recommend it to non coders trying to code.
  • j45 6mo ago
    In your experience do you think something like this could feed into agent swarms pretty well?
• leontloveless 6mo ago
  [dead]
• mika-el 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• mobrienv 6mo ago
  All you need is a good spec and a hat-based ralph-orchestrator loop https://github.com/mikeyobrien/ralph-orchestrator https://github.com/mikeyobrien/ralph-orchestrator
• yrds96 6mo ago
  Let me guess. Yeat another bunch of md files trying to fix bad prompts from unskilled programmers?
• tomkaczocha 6mo ago
  I’ve been testing GSD on several of my projects recently. I also looked at GSD-2. Both of these have some interesting features but they are so very slow. Before learning about GSD I built my own framework. That’s so much quicker. It’s on GitHub.
  • tomkaczocha 6mo ago
    [dead]