The Spec Growth Engine: Spec-Anchored, Code-Coupled, Drift-Enforced Architecture for AI-Assisted Software Development

[Submitted on 25 Jun 2026]

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Abstract:AI coding agents dramatically accelerate implementation speed but introduce two structural failure modes that existing spec-driven approaches do not fully solve: (1) context explosion — the agent must reason over an entire repository at once, degrading output quality as the context window fills; and (2) silent spec-code drift — code evolves, the specification does not, and the divergence becomes invisible until it is costly to repair.
We present the Spec Growth Engine, a lightweight framework that addresses both failure modes through a machine-readable spec graph whose nodes carry explicit contract/design separation, a Spine context assembler that scopes agent context to an ownership path, a vertical-slice growth protocol that enforces hardest-first ordering, and a drift gate that makes spec-code divergence a blocking merge condition.
The design synthesises well-established software engineering principles (Parnas information hiding, C4, ADRs, Walking Skeleton, Reflexion Models, Fitness Functions) into a lean, code-coupled, machine-enforced whole — without the overhead of heavy-weight frameworks such as RUP or MDA.

Submission history

From: Hartwig Grabowski [view email]
[v1] Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:51:22 UTC (21 KB)