Four spec standards, one baseline, two different decisions
Two side projects, one developer, an AI assistant on both. You work on them when you can and when you feel like it, for fun. And precisely because it's for fun, you drop everything that's boring: documentation. Two projects that age differently The app started as a way to keep track of the things about my cat that the vet asks for at every visit, and the data was already there: notes on recycled…
Two side projects, one developer, an AI assistant that writes documentation for both. The AI crafts the documentation in four distinct formats, deliberately chosen based on the specific risks faced by each project. For the AI assistant, the risk is drift, so the assistant adopted OpenSpec, which maintains a current set of specifications that are updated as deltas when requirements change.
For the cat tracking app, the risk is forgetting to align the baseline, so the AI opted for Spec Kit, which requires every proposal to be measured against the project's real constraints before any code is written. By using the AI assistant to create documentation in these two different ways, the developer gained a clearer understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each format.
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