Specs Before Code: The "Waterfall in 15 Minutes" Workflow

Google engineer Addy Osmani's widely-shared LLM coding workflow guide emphasizes writing a spec.md collaboratively with the AI before writing any code, then generating a step-by-step plan from that spec. The key insight: planning first forces you and the AI onto the same page, prevents wasted cycles, and dramatically improves output quality. Other key tips include breaking work into small iterative chunks, committing frequently as "save points," maintaining CLAUDE.md rules files to steer the AI toward your team's style, and running AI-on-AI code reviews (e.g., write with Claude, review with Gemini).

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Sources: Addy Osmani's Blog · Substack