Failure lab: Your specification is the product now / Spec-driven analysis with AI

About this workshop

For most of your career, someone downstream cleaned up after your requirements. A developer asked a question. A colleague filled in the obvious gap. Ambiguity was absorbed quietly, by people, and you never saw the bill.

That's gone. AI builds exactly what you wrote, immediately, without asking. This workshop makes that visible in the most direct way available: you write a specification, AI builds from it, and the room examines what came out.

Learnings

• Where your writing is ambiguous, not in theory, but demonstrated in front of you.
• How to interrogate a stakeholder when your questions are limited and your assumptions are not.
• How AI-generated specifications fail: rarely vague, often confidently specific about things nobody decided.
• How to review a specification you didn't write, and catch what reads well but isn't true.
• How to build a reusable critic that challenges specifications instead of approving them.
• How to chain agents into a working flow for your own analysis work.

Who is this for?

• Business Analysts
• Functional Analysts
• Product Owners
• Requirements Engineers

Agenda

Morning, the failure lab

Everyone works the same case. You write the specification from scratch, feed it to AI, and watch it build. The room then works out, together, exactly where the specification permitted what happened and you rebuild until it holds.

Afternoon, the reversal

The case escalates with a change request, and now the machine writes and you review. You interrogate a stakeholder under a hard question limit, with an AI helper generating more questions than you're allowed to ask. You review an agent-drafted specification against what you learn. Then you stop reviewing by instinct and build an instrument that does it reliably, a critic you can include in your own workflows.

You leave having assembled an agentic flow for your analysis work: the agents, how they hand off, and where you stay in the loop. Not a demo you watched. Something you built, tested, and can run the next say.

What you need to bring

A laptop and a paid subscription to an AI chat tool that supports custom agents likd ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, or Microsoft Copilot with agent creation enabled. Please have this working before you arrive; we won't have time to sort out accounts on the day.