Spec-driven development: The AI engineering workflow at Notion | Ryan Nystrom

0:00Ryan Nystrom:One line that I've been putting in my prompts lately is I literally don't know what I'm doing here. You got to explain it like I'm a five-year-old. I didn't start with writing code. I didn't start with anything. I just started with an empty markdown document. I actually just opened up whisper and just started yapping about how this feature should work. I gave the yap session to codex and was like, write a spec. I then opened up codex again, pointed it at this spec file, and I said, build it. And basically one-shotted this. I've been in software engineering for 20 plus years we were writing these documents and we were sitting in meetings with other engineers debating the merits of one implementation versus another and now no more waiting for the meeting no more waiting for review i'm not a ci expert but i kind of know what i want and so other folks were kind of like can you just bring some of your like puppy dog energy to like ci and just see what we can do your ai your agent is never going to complain when you ask it to do this five minutes before the meeting starts.

0:58Ryan Nystrom:It is more relaxing and it's more fun. And I feel like I'm getting more done. It's weird to have this like win, win, win. They do the triangle and they're like, pick two. And you're like, no, I'm going to pick all three. Give me the whole triangle. Give me the whole triangle.

1:13Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vaux, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Ryan Nystrom from Notion, and he's going to show us as an engineering manager how you can never prep for a standup again. We're also going to see how you can get a background agent to write code for a fix your friend texted you, and how Spectrum and Development really works in a code base at scale. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically.

1:51But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems. Your copilot needs to see your entire code base. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch? It's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale up market faster.

2:31Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands. Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at WorkOS.com. Start building today. Ryan, welcome to How I AI. I am really excited because you're going to show us, I think, start, medium, advanced mode on some AI coding stuff. And so before we jump in, how has AI just changed how you live your life at work?

3:10Ryan Nystrom:I mean, it has completely upended the way I work. I've been doing this, I did a lot of mobile iOS work in my past, and I worked the same way every day for 12 plus years. And then the last year I have changed IDEs, terminals, tools, whatever, like 10 plus times. so it's like really weird and scary to be like changing this stuff so much but it's also I feel that like I've been doing this for a while and I'm feeling like so much like joy and freshness and like newness in this that like I wake up every day super excited to like tinker and build things and I'm also like working faster and harder than I feel like I ever have but like in a good way I know people are like kind of freaked out about like everything's changing the pace is up but like It's really energizing for me.

4:07Well, you are not alone. I think every How I AI guest has come on and said, I'm having more fun. I'm working faster and everything is different. And what I love about what you're going to show us is it's not just the set of tools, which I think has changed or how we write code has changed. How you run a team has changed. And I think for the better. you know so i would love to see how you're using notion ai to actually run teams differently

4:36Ryan Nystrom:yeah for so for context i i manage a team of like six seven people um i'm like an engineering manager or a technical engineering tech lead manager or whatever we call it i manage people and write code uh is like my role which i love and i've run a bunch of different projects here notion the the one i'm going to show today uh we've we've nicknamed afterburner like kind of a quick backstory is i've been kind of vocal about our like devx ci for a while um i've just i worked at places where it's really slow i've worked at places where it's really fast and i came here and i was like we're kind of like in between but i feel like we're like slower than we need to be uh and eventually this like caught up to me and somebody was like could you just come fix it and like come work on it and I'm not like a infra expert I'm not a CI expert but I I kind of know what I want and I think also most importantly the the group that I manage and the the org that I work in we're a little notorious for being like really fast and like very very AI pilled and so other folks were kind of like can you just bring some of your like puppy dog energy to like CI and just like see what we can do.

5:56Ryan Nystrom:And that's what we've done. So we had this really aggressive goal to cut our CI into like a quarter of what it is. We're on the path to doing that. But so what I want to show you is a little bit about how we run projects in Notion and how I'm using AI to kind of streamline those projects. So what we're looking at here is like our like project hub called Afterburner. and so in here I've got all this documentation I've got databases um we'll look at some meetings I have like a automation that looks for any sort of like little wins if we knock off seconds from different jobs or whatever and we keep it we keep track of them in here but what I want to show you is basically how we run our meetings our small group we'd run a stand-up every single day and doing stand-ups where everyone just like is kind of like dead-eyed and going around being like I did this I shipped this change or you know no updates for me thanks is like painful and in my opinion like a huge waste of time I want to like get to the the meat so we have this kind of like automated meeting template that shows up every single day that we run our meetings which is basically every day and it starts blank and then what i have set up behind the scenes is a custom agent so we chipped this notion ai custom agent stuff a little bit ago and this runs right after the meeting template gets generated and it looks through all of our like slack conversation in the last 24 hours any tasks in notion that we close any um pull requests that we've like merge just like all sorts of contexts oh and it looks at like yesterday's meeting transcript as well and then it compiles it basically like a pre-read and um this is a this is one from a week or so ago and it yeah it shows it pulls metrics it can show us like what our latest ci time is it shows some of the things we've decided shows like progress on different like projects or like different things that we're trying to like make faster bugs feedback open questions like anything that's like of concern and like i can basically work up until like the minute of our meeting without having done a bunch of like prep and then we all get on a video call and we look at the screen and we're like okay here's what we need to talk about and we'll like hit each bullet we have like meeting notes that we run down here um within notion and like all the context is basically captured all of the like agenda is like set up for me so we spend the entire time talking about like problems decisions wins findings like what are we going to work on next and it's less the like oh i did this thing yeah what i want to call out for folks that are maybe listening and not watching is this is a very detailed meeting like kind of like pre-read status update which if you're a you know tlm or an em running good meetings unfortunately is part of part of the job and there's a really big difference between a good stand-up and a bad stand-up and i think the the ones you described these like wrote like i wrote with this PR, today I'm gonna start on this.

9:29And then basically like a notes document that's a very high level because some human is putting it together, it stinks. And you start to like do, the other thing that I found and maybe I'm curious if this has impacted how you work or just made it easier, which is like you start to have those meetings less because the updates aren't super rich, people don't feel like it's a good use of their time and I think you lose something by reducing the frequency. But if you can have high bandwidth, high quality meetings with high frequency without the overhead, I think you can get better, more detailed work done collaboratively, especially if you're running like a remote team where not everybody's in the same room.

10:16So I'm curious, do you feel like just being able to get to this level of detail in your standup has improved how you can actually build this product and do this work basically?

10:25Ryan Nystrom:I've been in way too many meetings where I can tell like everybody's eyes are glazed over nobody's paying attention and I like I have run enough projects at this point where like to me that's like pretty dangerous because like everybody in that room has ideas they have insight but like because we've made it like so non-productive and like not engaging that like we're not we're just like we need the point of the meeting is to like exchange ideas and information. And if we're like not doing that, like literally what's the point? The whole like this could have been an email. Like that's what the meme is from.

11:01Ryan Nystrom:And so I found that this is basically a good conversation starter. And a key thing to me that tells me that this is working is when I'm like I'm running these meetings and kind of going through like bullet by bullet. And then I see like, oh, somebody like fixed our mock server environment in our our just tests. And we're seeing a test improvement by like up to 13 percent. Like, oh, I miss that. You know, that's that's super cool. Like tell like let's talk about it. And then from that, maybe like, oh, there's additional headroom that we can make on this. And so all of a sudden, like, let's drill into it.

11:42Ryan Nystrom:And so just like I also think it sort of democratizes that like sharing so that you've got some people that I could talk for an entire 30 meeting without shutting up. And then other engineers are like, you know, kept keeping to themselves, but like brilliant and super talented. And I think it's great. This kind of like raises everything up to the top and makes it very visible. I was thinking last night, truly, this is a little bit of a sidebar, but I was thinking last night how people don't know this. It's very, very confusing, as Claire Vo, the podcast host. I am such an introvert. I'm a crazy introvert.

12:19I will avoid humans with every fiber of my being. And I find, like, AI as a proxy for me to get over my own anxiety communicating with the other sidebar. It's, like, so insane. But I really feel it. Whenever I like message my open claw and I'm like, hey, Polly, can you email so and so blah, blah, blah on my behalf? My anxiety is gone. But when I sit in front of my Gmail and start typing an email, my introverts start showing. I'm like, I can't. I can't do it. So I think this is a real point, which is like you got to pull information out of everybody. Yeah. And there's like spikes and valleys of who is going to come and show off their work, how detailed they're going to be.

13:00It does not mean the work is not good. It does not mean they are not talented. They just have different skills in different environments. And so I love this call out of like, we're going to pull equal amounts of information out of everybody because the playing field is is equal. I also want to go back to something you said, which makes me think about burnout. But you said I can like work up until this meeting starts. And I know so many people who feel like they're in meeting after meeting after meeting. One, because when they're not in meetings, they're preparing for meetings. So you're getting rid of that.

13:35And then two, I think managers being able to, for example, code up until the stand up is such a burnout like protection mechanism, which is you would much rather your managers hands on the code, hands on doing work, filling a creative impulse than prepping for meetings. Sure, they're great at running the meetings, but let's do that in like this just in time mechanism where they're supported through these automations. And so I just imagine I used to feel so stressed as a leader and as a manager being like, if I'm not in a meeting, I'm prepping for a meeting and then I'm in a meeting. And if I can carve back more of my time to just do real things, that feels so much, so much, so much better.

14:21So I'm guessing you're having more fun just through the balance of the kind of work you're trying to do.

14:27Ryan Nystrom:Yeah, I'm having so much more fun working this way. I have done the like run a big engineering group where, yes, you're spending half of your time just compiling information, synthesizing it, writing reports, like doing all this stuff. And I hated it. Like, it's so draining. And now I feel like I'm in a sweet spot where I can support and work with a team of, like, very talented individuals. But also not have to, yeah, be, like, doing, like, paperwork the entire time. Like, I don't want to do, like, the tedium. I get a lot of joy out of working with people. It's, like, why I like managing. I like talking with them, having fun.

15:09Ryan Nystrom:I love, like, solving hard problems together. And then I like building stuff. And yeah, I think that we're maybe at an inflection point where like maybe this is controversial or not. But like if you're like a line manager, like write code, you know, get in there and like stay close. Maybe don't do the P0 hero projects, but like help your team fix bugs, like make optimizations, like whatever. You know, it's just it's so easy now. I mean, I'm going to pull that thread all the way up, which is like directors of engineering, VPs of engineering, like CTOs, CPOs. Write some code. Now is the time. And I say this all the time on this podcast.

15:59This is the era of the hard skill. This is not how do I get better at my soft skills and managing stakeholders. This is literally like how do you write code? How do you write automations? How do you learn these new tools? How do you understand what models do, do what for your own skills? That I think is super important. Okay, we could go on forever on this topic. I do want to show folks how you built this. Yes. Because we haven't seen, actually haven't seen, we've had a couple of Notion folks on the podcast. We haven't seen Notion AI in action. And I just want to see kind of your thought process on how you build something like this out.

16:32Ryan Nystrom:So I'm going to flip over to, this is our custom agent. Don't ask me why we got this like potato theme for like the entire project. I think it was kind of something about like CI is just this like cobbled together like mess. And so we're going to like make the potato like a rocket ship. I don't know. I don't even know if that makes any sense. But like now we're having fun with it and we have reactions and like agents and it has spun off into its own thing, which is fun. But this is our hot potato agent. So you can see I have this set up to run at 9 a.m. every single day. It's also set up for chat.

17:06Ryan Nystrom:it's set up if the agents mentioned but we never really use any of that and probably the important part is the actual instructions so in this instruction page giving context on like what the purpose of this agent is i am telling it to run yeah look back at 24 hours so basically telling it your job is to run every single day and i only want you to look back for the last like 24 hours of activity i'm explicitly telling it to use subagents which is kind of a sleeper feature in notion ai like this exists but we don't we don't really push it to use it very often yet because it's one it's very expensive and two it can be kind of finicky sometimes but um i helped build it so i know how this works uh and then i ask it to kind of like fan out and do like a map reduce where I'm saying go use the honeycomb mcp to figure out what the latest metric is look in our project channel and like find updates feedback questions I tell it where the task database is and how to look for tasks within this project and then how to find yesterday's meeting and then I give it a template in the instructions or I'm like this is your format I care about ci speed decisions progress changes bugs questions risks a little bit of guidance on writing and then when it's done uh i have it post to slack and i like emphasize this like brief i want it to be brief and fun and sometimes it's really corny and then sometimes it's like really good uh and it'll be very quirky and just post this like link in our slack channel and it's like hey here's your your pre-read some little quibble about like whatever you know like hey you guys are not making enough progress uh and then that's it and then it's we have our meeting note it's updated what i like the most about this one i can show you some of our like internal settings so this is like i give it access to all these things i'm like you can only view all this stuff because i don't want it going and like modifying our task database our project database like everybody at notion uses those but this meetings database in particular i'm like you know you can edit content because this is the one you're gonna like write and update the page it can read from our slack channels respond to our project one and then this was new to me actually when i set this agent up is our mcp so we've had mcp and we have this other thing called workers which is like kind of like writing code i haven't used them very much within custom agents but in this one in particular i'm like i know exactly where this metric is it's in honeycomb and so i like just configured the mcp in notion and by the way i like i like used the agent to like set itself up because i was like here's the query i literally gave it a screenshot of the honeycomb query i was like i don't know how this works can you just like update your instructions i love that you screenshot it you didn't even copy and paste it you're like please OCR this screen exactly too lazy I'm like here it is just take it figure it out and it it kind of it got it mostly like most of the way there I had to fiddle with it a little bit but yeah what what I appreciate about this and again for anybody trying to just brainstorm workflows where AI can actually have a huge impact on your productivity at work or life, I just feel like write down what you would do if you had time.

20:39If you had time, every morning at nine, you would sit down and you with your eyebrows would go through Slack. You would go through Honeycomb. You would ask people what's going on. You would look at GitHub and then you would compile it. And then you would try to be very fun in Slack. Like it's, it's just a description of what you would do. And it's, it doesn't have to be that complicated. and you can iterate so quickly on it. What I appreciate about this, you know, versus old era of more deterministic, like workflow style builders, is the updates are so easy to make. Just change the natural language, redo the order, change the trigger, give it more access to data, and then it's ready to go.

21:24Ryan Nystrom:Yeah, and you know, I think the other thing I've gotten hung up on when trying to think about like these automations, and I've seen others do is that like you get this like you start gigabraining it and you're like well how am I gonna save like five hours of work a day and I what you just said made me realize too that like the tedium that this removes for me is not like world changing but it's like 20 minutes a day and that's like 20 minutes I can spend doing other stuff and that like it's not even just about like saving that 20 minutes but it's like protecting my brain from like having to context shift about all this stuff and like ingest it and instead yeah it's just i know that the information will be there when i'm ready to like read it and i'm ready to like shift gears to this project um rather than yeah i i hate doing the like read this update copy all this information like put it into like an update board like it's soul sucking i mean you and i have been doing this for a while that's like that was i feel like 70 of my job at some point 70 of my job was just like what's going on and how do i massage it into a format appropriate for the audience at hand and it's always the same information it's just like what's the executive version of it and what's the team version of it and what's the full team version of it and like oh like my shoulders drop out of my ears when I realize we don't have like we just don't have to do it anymore.

22:57And the other thing that I think people maybe underappreciate about AI and this like just in time delivery is your AI, your agent is never going to complain when you ask it to do this five minutes before the meeting starts.

23:10Ryan Nystrom:I know. It's so great. It's so great. It's just like when you have it, drop it, get it done and out of your brain, I think is again, I go back to like burnout and enjoying your work and reducing toil and it just feels like a more relaxed way to work yeah we're happy it's so funny because it is more relaxing and it's more fun and i feel like i'm getting more done yeah it's weird to have like this like win win win yeah you know they they do the triangle and they're like pick two and you're like no i'm gonna pick all three yeah and i'm like give me the whole triangle give me the whole triangle that stamp it for the YouTube thumbnail.

23:51Give me the whole triangle. All right. This episode is brought to you by Orcus, the company behind Open Source Conductor, which powers complex workflows and process orchestration for modern enterprise apps and agentic workflows. Legacy business process automation tools are breaking down. Siloed low-code platforms, outdated process management systems, and disconnected API management tools weren't built for today's AI-powered world. Orcus changes that. With Orcus As conductor, you get a modern orchestration layer that scales with high reliability and brings humans, AI, and systems together in real time.

24:26It's not just about tasks. It's about orchestrating everything. APIs, microservices, data pipelines, human-in-the-loop actions, and even autonomous agents. So build, test, and debug complex workflows with ease, all while maintaining enterprise-grade security, compliance, and observability. Orcus. Orchestrate the future of work. Learn more and start building at orcas.io. Let's talk about, so we're talking about how meetings happen. Love this. You do write code though.

24:56Ryan Nystrom:I do write code. Sometimes with your fingers and sometimes with, you're my favorite harness of the moment. So let's go to how you get coded. Yeah. I want to show the little bit of a new workflow that we have going on in Notion. I honestly don't think this is necessarily a big feature that we're going to ship or we might ship some version of this feature. So this is all basically internal only at this point. But prior to this, the way, one, I love Codex. I've been a Codex stand for like, I don't know, six, seven months now. And we started building this Codex integration into Notion. prior to this it was like well i mean obviously you're using the cli to like write your prompt and then they created the codex app which is which is nice but i'm still like writing my prompt in this thing so i started actually writing prompts in notion pages where i can be a little bit more like free form and structured and you know i'm in like the cli i don't have to worry about like hitting enter and then like oh shit like i sent my prompt uh i can actually like write a document in Notion.

26:10Ryan Nystrom:But then, of course, I'm highlighting all of the text, copying it, going into my terminal, hitting paste, and letting it go. It's fine. There's MCPs and other stuff that I could be using, but I'm a very simple person. It was too much stuff. So we built this thing that we're kind of calling it, I think we're calling it both Software Factory, but I like its internal project name is Boxy because it's like all these little VMs that we install codex and clog code on. It's our little boxes where now we can actually invoke them from like tasks within Notion. And so literally happened this morning. A friend of mine who's a Notion fan texts me.

26:55Ryan Nystrom:He's like, hey, I like the tab block that you built, which is this thing. He's like, but I really wish I could like, I can like copy. I'll show you now. if I click on the dot dot dot thing next to a block, there's like copy link to block. He was like, man, I really wish I could just like copy link to a tab and then like send it to somebody. And I was like, oh yeah, that sounds really easy. So I opened up this task and I just took some notes and I dropped in this screenshot showing them where it could live. You know, this is like on the the tab block if i right click on it we get this little flyover menu and i just described the task i was like yeah let's put a copy link button here i also noticed that hovering over the delete button didn't change to red so i was like yeah we should fix that and i was like i know one edge case is like you're gonna have to like if you land on a url where we're like linking to this block and this tab like it's got to like switch to the tab on like fresh refreshes so i like kind of outlined all the the cases but you can see here this is one two three paragraphs four like four sentences and a screenshot it was like not not a lot and then uh this new thing that we built i can actually mention codecs from within our comments and this triggers are like boxy uh This is all our internal dev tooling stuff.

28:21Ryan Nystrom:And then it got to work. And I was looking at the timestamps earlier, and I think 10.40, 10.51 started the implementation. And then another 10 minutes later, it replies with a pull request link and a preview URL because we do the preview environment stuff. And it built the entire thing. And if I switch actually over to, here's the pull request. It built like the entire thing. It was like, here's how I tested it. And this was actually the coolest part to me is like, it actually uploaded screenshots of it doing its own like UI verification. And there was like a CI failure in it. So I was like, hey, I replied down here.

29:07Ryan Nystrom:Like, oh yeah, this part of this code change, I was like, I don't know what is going on here. This doesn't make sense. and there's some type check things and it was like cool here's why we did this change and i fixed your types and then there was a merge conflict let's also talk about just all world new world the emotions around code review uh-huh like i love that you're like i don't get this not i'm gonna try to get it or i've done my best to investigate and i'm pretty sure this is wrong like literally just i don't get it i don't get it i mean i didn't like send sending that to somebody oh yeah the win teammates be like no look it up it makes it so that's one of my one of my code review mechanisms as well as i'm just like i don't think this is right i yeah one one one uh line that i've been putting in my prompts lately is i'm like i literally don't know what i'm doing here you need to explain this to me especially doing all this ci stuff i'm like i'm in over my head like you gotta you gotta like explain it like i'm a five-year-old and sometimes it's like literally like caveman style like here are the things and i'm like i needed this well what i appreciate about this and we'll talk about it in a little bit later i think is we're not getting any of these clawed code warm fuzzies from codex i love it but when it talks to me I'm like I feel real dumb when you're talking to me Codex can you like okay okay here's what's going on so I think that sort of like I don't understand what I'm doing please explain it to me is I love it but I think it is a Codex specific experience Claude Code shows up and is like hey buddy guess what I made for you okay so stepping back before we go too deep on the personalities of all these coding models you have built just at mention and i think people miss this but it's important for particularly our engineering team and engineering leader listeners to pay attention to which is everybody they know that's smart it has some background agent hooked up to a virtual machine that they kick off so that you're not spinning up your local environment and doing all this stuff on your machine.

31:28And it just, I think the, we'll talk about this, but the velocity plus your DevEx plus your CI, I think is a huge piece of AI adoption in engineering. So if you are not, if you don't have a VM strategy and background agent strategy in your large engineering org, time to get one, time to do it.

31:48Ryan Nystrom:And we'll just ask Codex to build it. Be like, I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think this is, Claire said this is a good idea. Please build. Make no mistake. Okay, last one. We have a last use case you were going to walk us through. Yeah, so we recently rebuilt our entire agent harness. The quick TLDR is, just like everybody else, we reached this point of tool and instruction fatigue where you had this bloated system prompt. So we're like, okay, we need to dumb this down. and we borrowed the kind of like skills and progressive disclosure concept from coding agents and brought that to Notion AI.

32:29Ryan Nystrom:And when we were doing this big rewrite, we were asking ourselves like, you know, it had only been like six months since we shipped the last rewrite. And this time we were like, what would we do differently? Like seeing the state of the art with coding agents and someone had this really great idea to like, let's not start with code. like let's just start with specs and what we've ended up building um is we have this like in our checked into our code base you see this we have this we're looking at this is a notion repo but we have this agent specs subfolder and within this subfolder we have all these markdown documents this is one that that i worked on uh we have this thing in our uh ai called ask mode where we basically ban all the like mutating tools so it can only just like read and answer questions and so when i was building this i didn't start with writing code i didn't start with anything i just started with an empty markdown document and uh i mean i actually just opened up like whisper and just started yapping about how this feature should work and at the end of it i gave that But I gave the YAP session to Codex and was like, here's our other like spec library.

33:46Ryan Nystrom:Learn the format. Take my information. Write a spec. And then it spiked the first version. I did a couple revisions on it. And I ended up with this Markdown document. Now, the Markdown document is like, it's nice. But what we did with it next, in my opinion, is I kind of think that this is like the future of software engineering. where I then opened up Codex again, pointed it at this spec file, and I said, build it. And it basically one-shotted this because the entire spec file is so comprehensive with code pointers, with down at the bottom, we have verification. It was like, here is how you're going to verify all of this stuff works.

34:30Ryan Nystrom:And we've even built our own CLI tools so that you can run Notion AI from the CLI and it could, once it's done seeing that all the tests pass, it can actually just spin up Notion AI itself, send it queries, send it questions, enable ask mode, disable ask mode, and then see the transcripts and like see what actually happens. And I think the first shot of this took a couple hours, but I came back to whatever, a couple thousand lines, did some code review, played with it myself. And I was like, it's right. It's like done. and you know since then we've made i can the other beauty of this is like this is inversion control so i can go to the past changes of this spec file and i can see how the the spec has evolved and it i could go look through all the code changes which also have their own like history but this is now the sort of like source of truth for how this part of notion ai works and it's just in plain English that can then be verified and implemented by agents.

35:33Well, I think the other thing that people don't appreciate is, you know, taking this outside of the engineering flow is this plain English can be ingested by other parts of the business that need this information. So let's say you need to then release this feature via some sort of marketing. This is actually like a pretty good asset that explains how it works. That can be translated into another thing. In a way that like code itself is still a little intractable and so this idea of spec driven development but what i like about what you said i don't want people to miss is the way you make these updates is you update the spec and go go go look make the make the update change the thing um and so like the spec is the source of truth the spec as the the change log i think is a really interesting model.