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Methodology

Skill-Driven Development vs Spec-Driven Development

Most teams using AI for development have settled on a workflow that looks roughly like this: write a detailed specification, feed it to the agent, review the output, iterate. It is disciplined. It is responsible. It works. And after six months of watching it in practice, I believe it has a structural limitation that becomes more expensive the longer you use it.

The limitation is not quality. Spec-driven development produces good output. The limitation is that every session starts from zero. The spec carries the knowledge. The agent carries nothing.

The AI-Augmented Consultant: Knowledge Infrastructure Before Deliverables

A brief arrives on Friday afternoon. A compliance startup is building an AI-powered scoring engine. They have a working architecture. What they do not have are settled positions on five hard architectural questions. The deadline is Monday.

The question I asked myself was not "how do I answer these five questions?" It was "what knowledge infrastructure do I need to answer them well?"

That reframing is the entire methodology in one sentence.

Autonomy at Scale

Over the years I've tried a lot of organisational models. Standups. Retrospectives. Timesheets. Sprint planning. The full suite.

At eXOReaction, we've converged on something different. It's not a framework with a name. It's more a set of positions — things we've decided, and held to, even when they make people uncomfortable.

Mastering Deadlines: The 80/50 Rule

In 2017 I wrote a short piece out of frustration — a street-smart survival guide for developers tired of missing deadlines despite giving themselves plenty of time. Eight years later the problem hasn't changed. If anything it's worse: we have more tools, more planning methods, more retrospectives, and we still end up in last-minute panic on projects we thought we had under control.

I revisited the original piece in November 2025 with a bit of help from AI — research, narration, the lot. Here's the framework, written out properly.