Spec-Driven Development for Agentic Software Engineering: Harnessing Human-Agent Teamwork

Abstract

Context: Software engineering is moving from AI-assisted practices like vibe coding, in which assistants accelerate individual developers, towards Agentic Software Engineering (ASE), in which autonomous agents are delegated goal-level tasks. However, industry reports a productivity paradox: as individual productivity increases, team throughput, review capacity, and stability degrade because team-scale software engineering discipline is neglected. Objective: This paper aims to establish the conceptual and methodological foundations of Spec-Driven Development (SDD) as an enabling discipline for ASE at team scale and characterize the harness, i.e., the technical and methodological mechanisms through which teams govern agent behavior. Method: We conducted a conceptual analysis drawing predominantly on gray literature, including ASE vision and roadmap papers, practitioner reports, talks, and tooling, because peer-reviewed evidence and a shared academic-industrial vocabulary are not yet established. Results: Using a comparative characterization of the paradigm progression as conceptual framing, the article presents (i) a socio-technical model of SDD in which specifications act as the contract substrate between humans and agents; (ii) an operational characterization of the harness, distinguishing the technical harness around the agent from the methodological harness around the team, with worked examples; and (iii) a typology of five human--agent interaction patterns through which the human role is redefined. Conclusion: We conclude that SDD reconstitutes, in specification-centric form, the contracts that vibe coding dissolves: accountability, verifiability, and transferability. Given the immaturity of the evidence base, this work is presented as a first step toward academic-industrial consensus rather than a validated theory, and outlines a research agenda for future empirical validation.