You are totally right, I should have done that from the start. I have just made public a repo I used to test that version of the scaffold: https://github.com/pangon/local-TTS-web-app
It's currently in the coding phase, so the requirements definition and the design phase is done.
Very similar, in particular the first phase is lot of markdown and no code too, but spec-kit is clearly more matrue and wide in features and support, while my scaffold is newborn and supports just Claude Code.
I feel that my scaffold is more adherent to old-style waterfall, for example it begins with the definition of the stakeholders, and take advantage of the less adopted practice to maintain assumptions and constraints, not just user stories and requirements.
A big difference is that I have introduced decisions, that are not just design decision, but also coding decisions: after the initial requirement elicitation phase whenever the agent needs to decide on approach or estabilish a pattern, that is crystallised in a decision artifact, and they are indexed in a way that future coding sessions will automatically inject the relevant decisions in their context.
Another difference is that when using the scaffold you can tell high level goals, and if the project is complex enough the design will propose a split in multiple components. Every component can be seen as a separtate codebase, with different stack and procedures. In this way you obtain a mono-repo, but with a shared requirement/design that helps a lot in the change management, because sometime changes will affect several components, and without the shared requirements and design it will be pretty hard to automate.
For sure the proposed approach is more token-consuming than just ask high level the final outcome of the project and make an AI agent to decide everything and deliver the code. This can be acceptable for small personal projects, but if you want to deliver production ready code, you need to be able to control all the intermediate decisions, or at least you want to save and store them. They are needed because otherwise any high level change that you will require will not be able to make focused and coherent enough code changes, with previous forgotten decision that are modified and the code change that will produce lots of side-effects.
I don't have any benchmarks avalable right now, and honestly I found pretty hard to make them considering that the workflow I have set up is not fully automated, but there is a lot of human intervention in the pre-coding phases.
I feel the problem of token wasting a lot, and actually that was the first reason I had to introduce a hierarchy for instructions, and the artfact indexes: avoid wasting. Then I realized that this approaches helped to keep a lean context that can help the AI agent to deliver better results.
Consider that in the initial phase the token consumption is very limited: is in the implementation phase that the tokens are consumed fast and that the project can proceed with minimal human intevenction. You can try just the fist requirement collection phase to try out the approach, the implementation phase is something pretty boring and not innovative.
I've been a long-time HN lurker. Like many others, I never created an account to participate and mostly just read without posting.
Today, for the first time, I actually have something I'd like to contribute: a personal open-source project I built with the community in mind and wanted to share.
But if I create a new account, I get redirected to https://news.ycombinator.com/showlim
I also have an older account from 2021 (the one I'm using to comment right now) that I barely used, and that one doesn't let me post to Show HN either. It just says: "Sorry, your account isn't able to submit this site".
I understand the need to limit spam. But shouldn't mechanisms like upvotes, shownew, and showdead already help with that? A full block like this seems to hit not just spammers, but also lurkers and new users who are trying to contribute for the first time.
To me, that risks making the community feel more closed than it should.
It's currently in the coding phase, so the requirements definition and the design phase is done.
You can see the repo yourself, the most interesting artefacts generated are from the ojectives phase and are indexed in this file: https://github.com/pangon/local-TTS-web-app/blob/main/1-obje...
Another interesting output of the scaffold skill is the execution plan, organized in phases with milestones, where the new capabilities delivered can be tested after completing a phase: https://github.com/pangon/local-TTS-web-app/blob/main/3-code...