Spec-to-Kill, Forward

Written with Claude. The direction I wasn’t using Last week I wrote about the spec-to-kill method. Short version: I had an MCP server I’d built six months earlier, cargo-culted into eleven tools, genuinely useful but Rube Goldberg. I couldn’t decide whether to clean it up or rip it out. So Claude and I specced the best possible version (handler separation, schema validation, four clean tools), and then I asked whether even the ideal version earned its keep. The answer was no. grep handled the dataset. The spec became the teardown blueprint. ...

April 21, 2026 · 10 min · 2083 words · Chris Hughes

The Spec-to-Kill Method: Pressure-Testing Vibe-Coded Infrastructure

Written with Claude. The Swiss army knife you have to hold a certain way I run a field data collection platform for building assessments. The app has AI agents that look up equipment costs, write condition narratives, validate data, and generate reports. Those agents need to find cost records in a database, do deterministic math (no LLM arithmetic on dollar amounts), and write results back to a JSON file. ...

April 15, 2026 · 10 min · 1995 words · Chris Hughes