A new Hacker News post introduces Agent Smith, a specification-first agentic development plugin launched in 2026. The system builds code from over a thousand specifications, generating approximately 500,000 lines of code. The procedure establishes a structured workflow where each spec corresponds to one branch, one commit, and one pull request.
A verified reviewer checks each spec against the code before the build process begins. The system utilizes parallel processing with one branch and worktree per specification, ensuring unique IDs derived from the clock so that two agents never claim the same identifier. Work is resumable, as state is stored in context.yaml, allowing the agent to restart and continue from where it stopped.
Every choice is logged with what it beat and why, keeping reasoning next to the code. Larger changes are cut into series of specs, with a deliver-series command reviewing all of them, building groups that share no files simultaneously, verifying the merged tree, and opening a single pull request. The methodology emphasizes structured development with verified specs acting as the foundation for uninterrupted agent building, reducing the need for agents to return and ask open questions.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing