FASTER PROTOTYPES MISS THE POINT: THE CASE FOR SPEC-DRIVEN DESIGN

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Design risks being sidelined in agentic development teams unless it moves beyond faster mockups toward actively authoring specs and managing knowledge. Two persistent inefficiencies—slow knowledge retrieval and lossy intent handoffs—can be resolved through a shared Product Knowledge Base and a single living feature spec that evolves from discovery through handover. This "spec-driven design" approach shifts designers' time toward user research and co-creation, letting intent and accumulated knowledge reach development intact rather than degrading through meetings and interpretation.