Spec-driven development, moved to where teams actually agree - the start of the project

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.

Penling turned into a fully featured project delivery platform backed by the Anthropic API to help drive out clearer outcomes, focused areas of work, publishable build plans, and ultimately a way of driving clearly specified tasks to the LLM (via the Penling MCP) to keep them honest and narrow-focused on the task. We end up with a verifiable implementation, tested code and small Pull Requests and a documented specification of what was built & why.

Testing's mostly been TypeScript/React, GitHub-only for now. If the idea resonates, hit "notify me" and I'll let you know when it's live. Happy to answer anything in the meantime.