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Beyond the Prompt: Spec-Driven Development and Context Engineering for AI Coding Agents
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 14 2026
Pages: 118
Weight: 0.37
Height: 0.25 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
The first time an AI coding agent builds something real for you, it feels like magic. Then you point it at a years-old codebase with conventions, history, and other people depending on it, and the magic turns into drift: invented patterns, a second way to do everything, and bugs that surface weeks later. Beyond the Prompt is a practical methodology for that world, the brownfield systems where most software work actually happens.
It brings together the two disciplines that determine whether AI-assisted coding succeeds at scale: context engineering, controlling what the agent sees, and spec-driven development, controlling what it is trying to build. You will learn to:
- Treat the context window as a finite resource and curate it with five repeatable moves
- Give the agent a durable briefing and grounded retrieval so it never works blind
- Write specifications that serve at once as the agent's target, your few-shot examples, and your tests
- Run the full spec-driven loop, specify, plan, tasks, implement, end to end on a real feature
- Anchor every change to patterns your codebase already trusts, so output belongs
- Verify behavior and conformance, and govern the practice across a team
Every idea is built on running examples you can clone: DataSlice, a realistic brownfield application (FastAPI + Angular) where you add a feature the book's way, plus a from-scratch greenfield example built end to end in TypeScript (Express + Angular). The complete companion codebase is included so you can build the features yourself and compare against a reference implementation.
If you are past the demo stage and need AI-assisted code you can actually ship, review, and maintain, this book is the method.
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