Systems Modernization & AI Development

Don't let a model grade its own family

An LLM judge interrogates the outsider and believes its own kind — and it looks exactly like rigor

Posted on June 20, 2026

I spent a week comparing Claude Opus and Claude Sonnet on the same spec-driven pipeline, run against pdb_search, a brownfield Python repo of mine. Opus is the stronger model, Sonnet the cheaper one. To score the runs I used a third instance, an Opus 4.8 orchestrator. Same family as one... [Read More]

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Spec Kit's fit and limits in ERP modernization

Audit discipline, sharp Constitution, deterministic transpiler underneath

Posted on May 22, 2026

Previous posts have analysed how Spec Kit handles a small brownfield database (Post 1, Post 2, Post 3). This post is about whether the same pipeline fits legacy modernisation. [Read More]

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Implementing the spec: where discipline holds and where it slips

Right behaviour can ride on a wrong cited mechanism. Cross-artefact consistency is checked on apply, not on generation.

Posted on May 12, 2026

Post 1 and Post 2 covered the Constitution-generation phase and the audit moves that corrected it. Once the spec is stable, the same tool starts writing code, with the spec as the contract. [Read More]

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Auditing as you go: what corrections actually look like

Vague principles produce compliance theater. Sharp principles produce mechanical self-correction.

Posted on May 5, 2026

“Claude Code might be over-eager and add components that you did not ask for.” is the warning spec kit includes in its own README. [Read More]

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Spec Kit on a brownfield codebase: setup and first impressions

The interesting hallucinations show up in the Constitution, not the implementation.

Posted on May 3, 2026

In April and May I ran the same Spec Kit pipeline against two codebases with the same prompt. One was a small full-stack toy app I had refactored several times before the run, with intentional bugs left in place: sync sessions under async routes, dual ORM mapping, a hardcoded "not... [Read More]

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