My day job is at a large tech company. Hundreds of engineering teams, and every one of them is somewhere different on AI adoption. Some are still treating coding agents as a curiosity. Some have quietly rebuilt their whole workflow around them. Most are in the messy middle, and watching that middle is where the idea for Penling came from. Spec-driven development has arrived, and I think it's the right idea. Tools like SpecKit and Kiro put the specification front and center to the coding workflow, and the results are noticeably better - an agent working from a written spec produces dramatically better output than an agent working from a vibe and a prompt. But look at where the spec gets written. In the engineer's IDE. In the terminal. At the moment the task gets picked up. That's a long way from where the product decisions were actually made. I built Penling as the answer to how we can produce better outcomes by shifting the thinking that goes into a specification beyond the engineer in the seat, making it a team artefact and a single source of truth (no more confluence -> Jira -> specification hopping). At the moment it works only with Github as the connected VCS. But the LLM integration is solid and really helps guide users to producing faster project goals, focused work, MCP available tasks that you use with your own LLM (Claude, Codex etc) and ultimately a reviewable and spec file. Give it a go. I'd love any and all feedback. I'm introducing Penling to a team at my day job company soon so keep an eye out for improvements as we learn more about how it performs on a day-to-day basis. Cheers, Paul 👋

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p/penling

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3mo ago

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.

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Penling

Spec-driven-development for product teams

Spec-driven-development for product teams

Forum Threads

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

Forum Threads

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