13 posts
Same AI, same codebase, same money-critical feature — built two ways. An apples-to-apples walk through 'normal' AI coding versus pro AI-Driven Development on a real billing-reconciliation milestone, with the tests, gates, and numbers that separate hope from proof.
11 min readYou left the enterprise SDLC — change boards, QA gates, sign-offs — to vibe-code solo with an AI. The safeguards didn't have to follow you, but their jobs did. A field guide mapping each one to its lean ADD equivalent, grounded in two real solo projects.
16 min readA controlled comparison: two AI workflows build the same forty-line function from one spec. GSD records it in five files and 644 lines of prose; ADD in a 22-line contract. Real recovered artifacts and exact token logs show ADD spent 5× fewer tokens with the same passing tests.
14 min readAI-Driven Development isn't a replacement lifecycle — it re-wires the one you already run. A stage-by-stage field guide mapping ADD onto requirements, design, dev, review, test, security, release, ops, and maintenance — grounded in two real projects.
19 min readThe five competencies behind AI-Driven Development — Domain, Spec, UI/UX, Test, and AI/Build — and why each is a separate discipline the agent stands on. The foundation that makes 'constrain the what, free the how' actually work.
12 min readA field study of ai-proxy, a multi-tenant AI gateway built end-to-end with ADD: 23 milestones, ~120 tasks, six days, zero waivers. What the method felt like in production and how the LLM behaved when scope was clamped.
12 min readThe frozen contract is ADD's one human gate — the interface, data shapes, and error codes, locked and checksummed before the agent builds. Why it is the single approval that earns the agent its autonomy.
12 min readADD's first two steps kill fast waste before a line of code exists: Specify (Must do, must Reject with error codes, the After-state) and Scenarios (concrete happy, edge, and failure examples in domain language). Pin the what.
11 min readTests-first, pointed at an AI agent: write a red suite that asserts observable behavior, then turn the agent loose with one instruction — make every test pass, change nothing in the tests or the contract. Red to green.
11 min readVerify by evidence, not by reading the diff. ADD's earned-green: an adversarial refute-read that tries to break the result, because AI code is frequently plausible and wrong. Trust through proof.
13 min readAI made writing code nearly free and quietly broke the SDLC. AI-Driven Development — five competencies, eight steps — constrains what an agent builds while freeing how it builds, proven across a 23-milestone production gateway shipped in six days.
26 min readAn N+1 query that takes 50ms with 10 rows takes 5 seconds with 1000. A memory leak that grows 1MB/hour OOMs in 3 days. Here is how to profile, detect, and load test a multi-tenant Python backend before production tells you first.
14 min readUnit tests, integration tests, and API tests — each has a role in a Python backend. Here is a complete testing strategy for a FastAPI + SQLAlchemy project, showing what to test at each layer and how the patterns from this series make testing effortless.
10 min read