Like most spec driven development tools, GSD works well for greenfield or first few rounds of “compound engineering.” However, like all others, the project gets too big and GSD can’t manage to deliver working code reliably.
Agents working GSD plans will start leaving orphans all over, it won’t wire them up properly because verification stages use simple lexical tools to search code for implementation facts. I tried giving GSD some ast aware tools but good luck getting Claude to reliably use them.
Ultimately I put GSD back on the shelf and developed my own “property graph” based planner that is closer to Claude “plan mode” but the design SOT is structured properties and not markdown. My system will generate docs from the graph as user docs. Agents only get tasked as my “graph” closes nodes and re-sorts around invariants, then agents are tasked directly.
I think I have to get my head around a lot more than I think
Now all you really have to do is chat with claude about what you're thinking about building.
In plan mode, claude can't edit anything and has some extra "you're an expert at planning!" prompts prepended to your initial message in plan mode.
And then either when you're ready or Claude thinks the "plan" is gelling, it'll suggest stopping and let it write up a detailed plan. CC will dispatch some "planning agents" with prompts that your 'main' CC has crafted for that agent to plan for within the context of your conversation and what parts of the codebase it should look to integrate/explore.
Once all that is done, it will display it to you and then offer to "clear context and implement" - where it will just get to work. Or it will offer to go back to chatting and resolve whatever was misunderstood, or if you had a new idea you wanted to mix in.
These plans are saved as markdown in your .claude/plans directory.
Plan mode is handy on the on-off. But if you enter another plan mode, thinking claude would learn from, or build off a previous plan spec, it won't unless you explicitly say something like "read previous plan <path to plan file> and re-use the scaffolding directives for this new project"