Software Developers Urged to Draft Agentic Manifesto as Coding Agents Shift Bottleneck to 1 New Spec
Updated
Updated · InfoWorld · Nov 11
Software Developers Urged to Draft Agentic Manifesto as Coding Agents Shift Bottleneck to 1 New Spec
1 articles · Updated · InfoWorld · Nov 11
Summary
Coding agents are pushing software teams to rethink methodology around a new “Agentic manifesto,” with the specification—not hand-written code—proposed as the primary source of truth.
Spec-driven development could blend Waterfall and Agile: teams would iterate on requirements, regenerate applications in hours or days, and use customer feedback to refine the spec rather than the implementation.
Three main execution paths emerge for agent-built software—rebuild from scratch, modify prior code, or use a hybrid redesign—while agents could also generate broad unit, integration and end-to-end test suites.
The likely bottleneck shifts from coding to customer feedback and specification quality, though ambiguity in natural language, emergency debugging, agent costs and limits in legacy systems remain major constraints.
The biggest human work may move to hard-to-specify areas such as security, performance, accessibility and look-and-feel, raising broader questions about what software development means in an agent era.