DevSpark: Constitutional AI Governance Framework
A standalone AI-assisted development framework that extends Specification-Driven Development (SDD) beyond greenfield planning into continuous constitutional governance. Adds PR reviews, site auditing, risk analysis, brownfield discovery, quickfix workflows, release management, and automated upstream synchronization — making project constitutions enforce standards at every stage of the development lifecycle.
The story
The way I build software now. It runs in most of my active repositories, including this site.
- Problem
- AI coding assistants write code fast but forget intent. A project constitution I'd carefully written was bypassed two weeks later by a late-sprint hotfix that pulled in a banned package and broke three principles. Governance that only exists during planning is blind to reality.
- Decision
- Make intent travel with the work. Specs, plans, critic reviews, PR reviews and audits all check against the same written principles, whether the change is a planned feature or a hotfix.
- Implementation
- Plain markdown command prompts and scripts, with no install and no subscription, that work with most AI coding agents. It builds on Den Delimarsky and John Lam's spec-driven development work and extends it to existing codebases.
- Outcome
- Used every day across my projects, and the process behind API Test Spark and WebSpark.HttpClientUtility.
Overview
A standalone AI-assisted development framework that extends Specification-Driven Development (SDD) beyond greenfield planning into continuous constitutional governance. Adds PR reviews, site auditing, risk analysis, brownfield discovery, quickfix workflows, release management, and automated upstream synchronization — making project constitutions enforce standards at every stage of the development lifecycle.
Details
DevSpark is a standalone AI-assisted development framework that extends Specification-Driven Development with constitution-based PR reviews, codebase-wide compliance auditing, adversarial risk analysis, brownfield constitution discovery, and adaptive lifecycle management. DevSpark makes project constitutions valuable throughout the entire development lifecycle — from greenfield planning through continuous constitutional governance.
Related insights
Articles that explain the architecture decisions, implementation patterns, or delivery trade-offs behind this project.