I'm a tech lead planning to roll out coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot CLI) with Spec-Driven Development as the methodology around them. The challenge is that almost every SDD example I've found with spec-kit, Kiro and the usual blog posts assumes a single team working in a single repo. My reality is quite different:
- A platform built from many components like UI, HTTP services, event-driven consumers, warehouse and cache, all of them spread across multiple repos.
- Ownership split across several teams. My team owns some backend components but not all.
- Most interesting features are vertical slices: they touch the UI, a couple of services we own, an event consumed by another team, and sometimes a data contract owned by data platform.
The naive SDD flow assumes the agent can see the whole slice and one team can ship it. Neither is true here. What I'm trying to figure out is how SDD actually works when a single feature is spread across repos and teams that can't be coordinated by an agent alone.
If you've done this for real, I'd love to hear how you handle:
- Where the spec lives. One spec for the whole slice, or one per component with a coordinating doc on top? Who owns it, who signs off on it?
- Cross-repo context. How does the agent reason about a slice when half the relevant code lives in a repo it can't see, owned by a team it can't talk to?
- Coordinating contract changes. When the slice requires a new event or API owned by another team, how does that negotiation flow? Does it block the work, run in parallel, get stubbed?
- Sequencing. Who builds first, who deploys first, how do you avoid "we shipped, they aren't ready"?
- What didn't work. Approaches you tried and abandoned, frameworks that demoed well and fell over, anti-patterns worth warning me away from.
Not looking for theory; looking for real examples and experiences
u/Double_Appearance741 — 13 days ago