In this episode, I was joined by Tabish Bidiwale, the creator of OpenSpec! As a daily user (and big fan) of OpenSpec, this was a great honour to geek-out about it with the creator, and chat in general about coding with AI agents.

Tabish Bidiwale

Tabish Bidiwale is the founder of Fission and the creator of OpenSpec, an open-source, spec-driven development framework for AI coding agents. Based in Sydney, Australia, he has been building OpenSpec full-time since mid-2025, after five and a half years at quantum-computing firm Q-CTRL, where he worked his way up from graduate engineer to Senior Software Engineer. OpenSpec has gathered over 56,000 GitHub stars, and Fission is a Y Combinator company (Winter 2026 batch).

Links from the show

OpenSpec - Tabish's spec-driven development framework for AI coding agents
OpenSpec on GitHub - the open-source repository
OpenSpec Discord community
OpenSpec's "explore" prompt - the built-in explore mode prompt: a thinking partner for exploring ideas before any code is written
Matt Pocock's "Grill me" skill - a relentless interview to sharpen a plan or design
The unreasonable effectiveness of HTML - the Claude Code team on why they prefer Claude to output HTML instead of Markdown
AgentsView - a tool for inspecting the sessions your AI coding agents leave on disk
Kickbacks - Andrew McCalip's tongue-in-cheek plugin that puts sponsored ads in Claude Code's status line
Dan's "One at a time" skill - has the AI ask one question at a time instead of a wall of text
Dan's "Teach me" skill - teaches a concept progressively, one level at a time with comprehension checks
Dan's blog post: OpenSpec - a lightweight AI-driven spec framework

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