Hi I'm Paul. I'm a solo maker, building Penling alongside a day job in engineering management.
Here's what I kept running into: spec-driven development is everywhere now, and the tools are good - but they all assume the spec is something one engineer writes in their IDE, right before they build. In practice the spec is where a team agrees on what they're building. And most of the people who need to be in that agreement don't live in an IDE.
Spec-driven development has the right idea and the wrong timing. Every tool out there - Spec Kit, Kiro, the rest - puts spec-writing in front of one engineer, at the keyboard, right as they're about to build.
Penling flips this approach and uses generative AI from the start of your project all the way through the lifecycle to a reviewable PR containing tested work and a fully documented build specification that your whole team agreed on.
