Specsmaxxing Says Stop Writing Prompts, Start Writing Specs

Acai.sh just hit Hacker News with a manifesto called Specsmaxxing. The argument: the cure for AI psychosis is writing specs in YAML instead of writing prompts. The toolkit is open-source. The format is feature.yaml. The system that links specs to code and tests is called ACID, short for Acceptance Criteria for AI.

The pitch lines up with the Skills movement that has been building all year. Anthropic Skills, mattpocock/skills, browserbase/skills, marketingskills, awesome-codex-skills. But Acai is solving a different layer. Instead of asking how an agent should execute, it's asking how a human team should specify. The state machine tracks each spec from assigned through blocked through completed through accepted. Every spec gets a corresponding ACID tag in the source code.

This replaces ticket systems like GitHub Issues and Linear for teams using AI agents to do real work. The point is not faster prompting. The point is that prompts rot, specs don't. A feature.yaml file is a contract that the agent and the reviewer both have to satisfy. Three states, no ambiguity, no drift.

The CLI ships through npm with a single command. Server, dashboard, git workflow integrations are all in there. If specs-as-code becomes how teams collaborate with agents, this is the substrate. If prompt engineering wins, this is dead. Either way, the open-source bet is now placed.

Try it: npx @acai.sh/cli --help. Site: https://acai.sh