Is There a Middle Ground Between Vibe Coding and Spec Driven Development?

Spec Driven Development has become increasingly popular when working with AI coding agents — especially for complex applications with detailed technical and user requirements. On the other side, “vibe coding” thrives on speed. One prompt. Immediate feedback. Iterate until it works. But what if you’re building something and you genuinely don’t know how complex it will become? Is there a middle ground between Vibe Coding and Spec Driven Development? Not too reactive. Not too formal. Not too heavy. I recently ran into this exact problem. You can watch the full video on my YouTube Channel (CodeLess Developer) The Scenario: Building an AI-Generated Game Arcade I wanted AI to build a browser-based arcade of classic games: Tetris Pac-Man Space Invaders A fourth classic Previously, I had done this challenge using GitHub Copilot inside Visual Studio 2026 , powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5. At the time, Sonnet 4.5 felt like the best AI coding model available for that workflow. This time, I wanted to