I ran 3 months of spec-driven development without ever reading the code

I'm a scrum master. I was a developer ten years ago. I have enough background to discuss design and trade-offs with an LLM — but three months ago I made a deliberate bet on my solo project: I would never read the code. The specs define the tests. The tests control the code. The code is a black box. I'm not claiming this is what everyone should do. But it's my bet, and it forced a system into existence: when nobody reads the code, the process has to carry the trust that a code-reading human normally provides. I've just published that system as a reference implementation: backlog-as-data — the full writeup, the Claude Code skills translated to English, and the CLI source, verbatim from my daily setup. Here's the short version. The backlog is git data, not a document Most agent task-management tools store tasks in a dedicated place — a tasks.json , a database, a backlog/ folder. My bet is different: the backlog is the YAML frontmatter of my spec files. One file per ticket, and the ticket's status is a field — never a location in a document. --- id : PARSE-07 title : Tolerate CRLF in decklist import type : ticket status : todo priority : should exec : model : sonnet effort : think review : light matured : 2026-07-22 --- # PARSE-07 — Tolerate CRLF in decklist import The spec body: design, contracts, test cases. The ticket file IS the spec. Everything below the frontmatter is the spec — written by the LLM, after it has challenged the need I expressed in conversation. The frontmatter is data — owned by a small CLI, mutated only through it. Same file, so they can never drift apart. Why it matters: "move it to Done" is not an operation. LLMs (and humans) mangle documents when a state change means relocating text. Making status a field makes every transition a one-line, idempotent, testable mutation. The board I look at (a small web page on my server, with GitHub deep links to each spec) and the readable markdown view are generated projections , locked by a do-not-edit sentin