Hands-On Spec-Driven Development Workshop

Packt Publishing Limited

Move beyond vibe coding, generate more consistent and repeatable outcomes, and boost your productivity with SDD

AI coding assistants are powerful, but unpredictable. Without structure, they drift, hallucinate, and produce code that’s difficult to maintain. Spec-Driven Development (SDD) gives you a disciplined, repeatable framework to guide AI tools with crystal-clear specifications, so your outputs are consistent, testable, and production-ready.This workshop shows you how to stop “vibe coding” and start building with intentional, spec-first workflows used at Amazon and other high-scale engineering teams. <h3>Why Attend?</h3>As Martin Fowler explains, Spec-Driven Development begins by defining a clear, human-readable specification before writing any code. That spec becomes the single source of truth for both developers and AI coding assistants.In this workshop, Ricardo Sueiras (Principal Developer Advocate, AWS) will take you deep into how Amazon uses spec-first engineering to build complex, reliable systems, long before a single line of code is written.You’ll learn practical, hands-on techniques to:<ul><li>Turn vague ideas into precise, EARS-formatted requirements.</li><li>Break specs into tasks an AI assistant can reliably execute.</li><li>Guide AI through predictable development phases instead of chaotic prompting.</li><li>Build maintainable systems where the spec, design, and code stay aligned.</li><li>Incorporate context engineering to improve AI accuracy and reduce rework.</li><li>Understand where tools like Amazon Kiro fit into modern AI-assisted development workflows.</li></ul>Whether you're using Amazon Q, or Kiro, this workshop gives you the structured methodology needed to move from one-off wins to consistent, scalable AI-accelerated delivery. <h3>What You'll Get</h3>✅ Certificate of Completion to showcase your expertise 🎥 Full workshop recording with 120-day access 🔄 Q&amp;A session ⚡ Hands-on full-stack build 🧰 AWS Credits so you can explore in more detail some of the tools mentioned 👥 Networking with peers and experts in AI-driven development <h3>Who Should Attend?</h3>This workshop is designed for anyone looking to stay ahead of the curve in modern app development:<ul><li>Developers who want to move from ideas to code that you can actually run in production.</li><li>Python Developers who want to know more about new ways of using AI coding assistants with Python</li><li>AI Product Managers with basic knowledge of Python and AI coding assistants, eager to gain hands-on experience</li><li>Team and Engineering Leads who want to know more so they can evaluate SDD for their team’s projects</li></ul>Prerequisites:<ul><li>Technical: Whilst the examples will be in Python, you can follow along and use your preferred programming language</li><li>AI Coding Assistant: Kiro (download <a href="https://kiro.dev/downloads/" title="https://kiro.dev/downloads/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">here</a>) or Amazon Q CLI (Windows, Mac or Linux) - check out the installation guides here to help you <a href="https://dev.to/aws/getting-started-with-amazon-q-developer-cli-4dkd" title="https://dev.to/aws/getting-started-with-amazon-q-developer-cli-4dkd" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">here</a></li><li>Experience: Intermediate level programming experience.</li></ul><h4> </h4><h3>What Sets this Workshop Apart</h3><ul><li>Practical, project-based approach: You won’t just learn theory, you’ll build a complete demo application.</li><li>Step-by-step workflow: The workshop breaks down the key steps to specification driven development, and you will be following each of the steps to gain understanding of each step.</li><li>Live coding with real tools: Work directly with Python and AI coding assistants - this workshop will provide you access an AI coding assistant you can use for free (and which you can use even after the workshop has completed)</li><li>Execution focus: You will get to learn some new techniques that will help you generate more useful output from AI coding assistants</li></ul><h3>Expert instructors: Learn directly from SDD experts, Ricardo Sueiras and Simon Martinelli</h3>

<h3>Meet Your Instructors</h3> <h3>Ricardo Sueiras</h3><h4>Principle Dev Advocate at AWS</h4>A highly experienced technologist and change agent with an track record specializing in innovation, Cloud and Open Source. He is enthusiastic, passionate, articulate, creative and unconventional - an evangelist that seeks to accelerate the adoption of new technologies. He also has extensive coaching and mentoring experience, coaching and mentoring at all levels from new recruits to partners (as part of a reverse mentoring program). <h3>Simon Martinelli</h3><h4>Programming Architect at Martinelli LLC</h4>A seasoned software architect, developer, and consultant with over 30 years of experience, Simon specializes in software modernization, performance optimization, application integration, and modern software architecture. His expertise enables businesses to develop scalable, efficient, and future-proof software solutions that drive growth and revenue.

Agenda

Get to meet and interact with your peers. Who knows, you might even bump into the speakers, Ricardo and Simon!

Open Networking

In this short lecture we look at the evolution of AI coding assistants and how they have evolved over time. We explore some of the challenges and how specification driven development provides solutions. 

The key takeaway here is a good foundation on what spec driven development is, and how it compares with other approaches.

Intro and evolution that led to specification driven development

We will explore the key elements of specification driven development, taking a look at the key pieces that make it work. We start off with Requirements and look at how we can generate these and look at EARS as a way of expressing our requirements. Next we look at Design and how critical this is to the code the AI coding assistant will generate. We deviate and look at Steering files, and how these are essential to providing the right context to help steer the Design. Finally, once we are happy with our Design, we look at how to generate implementation Tasks, breaking down what we want to do (the Requirements) into small units of work.

Now that we understand the key building blocks, we will look at the lifecycle of specs and how these help build a stronger lineage between intent (what you want to do) and the code that is generated.

The key takeaway here is a solid understanding of the key building blocks for spec driven development.

 Introduction to Spec-Driven Development

We will now apply this knowledge and show you can build an application from scratch with specification driven development. We will go through the entire lifecycle to create a complete working application. Once we have it up and running, we will go through the spec driven lifecycle and show how to add new features, as well as how updating existing specifications work.

You will take away knowledge of how to apply spec driven development in your own development tasks.

Hands-On Spec-Driven Development Workshop

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Hands-On Spec-Driven Development Workshop

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