For over 11 years, non-partisan civil servants at 18F proudly served the American people to make government technology work better.

As of when writing this post in the first days of April 2026, the vibe coding community is buzzing about "Spec-Driven Development." Write a perfect specification, let the AI agents loose, sit back, and watch the magic happen. Revolutionary, right? For me, it feels like a déjà vu from the 2000s. Back then, we called it Waterfall or V-Model. The idea was the same: define everything upfront, hand it over to the people who build it, and collect your finished product at the end.

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Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, during the first batcrap insane 2014 Open Enrollment Period, a common refrain from Republicans looking to attack the newly-ramping up healthcare law was to demand "...