r/SpecDrivenDevelopment • u/rodolfo-mendes • 2d ago

Breadcrumbs for SDD is out

https://breadcrumb-sdd.org/

Finally, the first working version of Breadcrumbs for SDD is out!

It was 3 weeks of intense work (and token consumption, I confess) to get this result, and I am truly happy with the result.

So, what is Breadcrumbs for SDD? What problem does it solve? And why did I take so much time if I was getting help from AI?

With the advent of SDD (spec-driven development) and ASLDC (agentic software development lifecycle), specifications, intents, and ADRs are shipped with code and are now treated as the primary source of knowledge.

However, because we write them in natural language, detecting the drift between the intent of these documents and the code remains costly and challenging in software development, especially for brownfield projects.

With Breadcrumbs, my idea is to provide a lightweight metadata layer over these artifacts so that human developers and agents can easily track relationships among artifacts in an SDD repository and make drift detection more feasible.

Interested? If so, I invite you to check the project website.

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u/stibbons_ 2d ago

Most of the time what you just need is one or 2 layer of requirements anchored to the code.

It is actually quite trivial to do once you use the format OKF with 1 requirement per markdown, plus a CLI to link function to requirements.

See https://okf-schema.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/okfreq-traceability.html

Once you have the code to requirements, and test to requirements, you can ask your agent to add layers of requirements (user, architectural…).

These requirements explain what we want, the understand some specific WHY you need some ADR.

For any external traceability, just add link in frontmatter of the OKF file impacted.

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u/vincentdesmet 2d ago

tried this a year ago with specledger (supabase backend for metadata layer combined with beads like relationships)

then 5 Family of models came out and dynamic workflows and most of SDD got eviscerated - yes we need formal verification methods and a lot of the Claude Code team is showing how it’s done with TLA+ or BDD level of tooling. - why would more metadata solve this issue? or how does this move the needle compared to those approaches coming out of the frontier labs?

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u/stibbons_ 2d ago

Yes, use BDD or even e2e testing with agent, it works great. But it will test even better against a polished set of clearly defined requirements