It’s like I spent 20 years mastering painting in watercolour… nerding out on other painters, canvas options, even the backstory on some guy that makes a specific paint etc.
And I don’t regret any of that.
but now I’m just loving creating my art 100x faster.
I thought I loved the craft (and I did) but more, I loved the product.
I did this recently. Created a Skill that had access to executing very specific ific (reviewed) script for DB interaction, that connects to your a replica/anonymised DB, read only user, via VPN, via a jumpbox.
I’m working on Userdoc, a spec-driven development workspace.
Break down your software requirements (Userdoc guides you through the process), refine/confirm, setup your technical specs, coding/business guidelines & guardrails, and then create development plans (specs) which can be easily consumed by coding agents via MCP, or by platforms like Lovable / v0 using Markdown.
Working on Cursor background agent integration atm.
Your second point “planning in advance” could be referred to as spec-driven development… it’s a funny term in a sense (didn’t we always do that?), but I think your 7th point drives it home “a very weird form of management” - clear instructions, necessary context, and actionable feedback.
As far as written words go, much more like waterfall than agile.
This is why AI development will be huge in the “Buy vs Build” space… Businesses (with a capable tech team)can build the 20% of the SaaS they need, and stop paying for the 80% every single month.
We are tackling this at https://userdoc.fyi - we help you build your specs (epics, stories, acceptance criteria, tech notes, test cases, etc) - then you can generate what we call Dev Plans, one or more requirement layers for implementation.
e.g maybe a dev plan is all your authentication feature requirements, or in the house of analogy – all the requirements for the rooms, but with instructions to actually just first build the floor, and the walls.
Dev plans then slice the reqs into meaningful units of work, as mentioned in the article – a feature/story, is often too large of a checkpoint, or often needs to be implemented in collaboration with other features/stories, so it understands the correct architectural context,.
You can then implement Dev plans over MCP, or copy to .md for tools like Lovable or V0.