A Hands-On Workshop within Coding Agents: AI Driven Dev Conference

Overview

As coding agents become more capable, a fundamental question emerges: do we still need to share actual code, or is a specification and test suite sufficient? This workshop challenges conventional assumptions about software libraries and explores the emerging paradigm of spec-driven development. Using the whenwords open source library as a practical case study, we'll examine how coding agents are reshaping the way we think about library design, distribution, and collaboration—and what this means for your development workflow today.

Key Topics

The Code vs. Spec Debate: Examining whether traditional code sharing is becoming obsolete in an AI-first world, and what remains essential.
Spec-Driven Development: How to design libraries as specifications paired with comprehensive test suites, letting agents generate the implementation.
The whenwords Case Study: A deep dive into a real open source library built around this philosophy—how it works, what it unlocks, and where it breaks down.
Practical Applications: Identifying use cases in your workflow where spec-driven approaches can increase velocity, reduce maintenance burden, and improve agent reliability.
The Future of Code Distribution: Exploring the trajectory of this paradigm—what's possible today, what's still missing, and how to prepare your team for what's next.

Expected Outcomes:

Participants will leave with a clear understanding of spec-driven development and its trade-offs. You'll gain hands-on experience analyzing the whenwords library, learn when and how to apply this approach in your own projects, and walk away with a mental model for evaluating whether your next library should ship as code, spec, or something in between.

Pre-workshop Requirements:

Hardware: A laptop with internet access and a development environment set up.
Software: Please have an AI coding tool (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) installed and authenticated. Familiarity with basic CLI workflows is helpful.
Materials: No prior experience with whenwords is required, but come ready to explore how specifications and tests can replace traditional code distribution.

Workshop Access & Eligibility

This workshop is exclusively available to attendees of the main event and cannot be registered for separately.

Workshop access is offered on a first come, first served basis with limited seats available and each workshop has a capped capacity.

Conducted by:

[Hands-on Workshop] Software Libraries with No Code