Camino

AI · 2024 - Present

AT A GLANCE

Status

AUTS engineering team

Engineering the way AI builds software.

Type

Spec-driven development methodology

Tiers

Micro Spec · Quick Spec · Full SDD

Tooling

Everyone is using AI to write code. Very few people are engineering the process. There's a difference. Using AI is prompting. Engineering AI-assisted development means treating it like any other mission-critical process: defined inputs, explicit gates, traceable outputs, and a standard that doesn't bend because the model is confident.

C# WPF Requirements Manager

Notation

EARS requirements syntax

THE PROBLEM

AI coding tools are genuinely powerful. They're also genuinely dangerous in the hands of a team that hasn't thought carefully about where they fit in the development lifecycle. The failure mode isn't that the AI writes bad code — it's that the AI writes plausible code against requirements that were never made precise, in a codebase it doesn't fully understand, with no rollback plan if it goes wrong.

I've spent twenty years building software where that failure mode isn't acceptable. So when AI coding tools started maturing, I didn't just adopt them. I designed a system for how to use them.

THREE TIERS, ONE STANDARD

Camino routes every change to the right level of rigor before work begins — preventing both over-engineering small changes and under-speccing risky ones.

Micro Spec
Changes under four hours. Config values, text fixes, single-method bug fixes. Fast path, defined stop conditions.

Quick Spec
One-to-three-day brownfield changes. EARS acceptance criteria, Foundation-First task ordering, and mandatory rollback plan.

Full SDD
Complex changes requiring design decisions. A gated six-phase pipeline with dual acceptance at every gate.

This isn't AI as autocomplete — it's AI as a co-engineer with actual standing to say not yet.

The Full SDD runs six phases: Requirements → Code Analysis → Design → Task Breakdown → Implementation → CI/CD. Every gate requires sign-off from both the engineer and Claude before the next phase begins.

THE DUAL ACCEPTANCE GATE

THE REQUIREMENTS MANAGER

Alongside the methodology, I built a C# WPF desktop application to support it — EARS pattern picker, structured requirement fields, sprint metadata, dirty-state tracking, and full read/write round-trip to markdown. Zero external dependencies. It exists because the process needed a tool, and I built the tool I needed.

<- BACK TO WORK

STATUS

Currently in beta with my engineering team at AUTS — the same team building 24/7 mission-critical software for US nuclear power plants. That's the proving ground. If it works there, it works anywhere.

"I'm not searching for any opportunity. I'm looking for the right one."
Let's talk