Spec-Driven Development with Coding Agents

Learn spec-driven development in this short course built in partnership with JetBrains, taught by Paul Everitt, Developer Advocate at JetBrains.

Vibe coding is fast, but it often produces code that doesn’t match what you asked for. Spec-driven development is the disciplined alternative: write a clear markdown spec defining what to build, and let your coding agent implement it. Many of the best developers already work this way.

In this course, you’ll write project constitutions, plan and validate features in iterative loops, and apply the same repeatable workflow to both fresh and legacy codebases. You’ll also see how specs preserve context across agent sessions, reduce cognitive debt, and improve intent fidelity, keeping your agent aligned with what you actually want.

In detail, you’ll:

• Compare vibe coding and spec-driven development, and understand why detailed specs lead to better, more maintainable software.
• Write a project constitution by collaborating with your agent to define mission, tech stack, and roadmap.
• Plan, implement, and validate your first feature using a spec as the agent’s guide, staying in control as the human in the loop.
• Replan between features, build a second feature, and produce an MVP from your spec-driven work.
• Introduce SDD to a legacy codebase, using existing documentation to generate specs
• Package your custom workflow into an agent skill that’s portable across agents and IDEs.

Whether you’re starting from scratch or modernizing existing code, this course gives you a disciplined workflow for building software your way.

Anyone who wants to move beyond vibe coding and build more intentional software with agentic coding assistants. Basic familiarity with a programming language and experience with LLM-based coding tools is recommended.