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Show HN: Specific (YC F25) – Build backends with specifications instead of code (specific.dev)

29 points by fabianlindfors ↗ HN
Hi folks! Iman and I (Fabian) have been building Specific for a while now and are finally opening up our public beta.

Specific is a platform for building backend APIs and services entirely through natural-language specifications and tests, without writing code. We then automatically turn your specs into a working system and deploy it for you, along with any infrastructure needed.

We know a lot of developers who have already adopted spec-driven development to focus on high-level design and let coding agents take care of implementation. We are attempting to take this even further by making the specs themselves the source of truth. Of course, we can’t blindly trust coding agents to follow the spec, so we also support adding tests that will run to ensure the system behaves as expected and to avoid regressions.

There is so much ground to cover, so we are focusing on a smaller set of initial features that in our experience should cover a large portion of backends:

- An HTTP server for each project. Authentication can be added by simply stating in the spec how you want to protect your endpoint.

- A database automatically spun up and schema configured if the spec indicates persistence is needed.

- External APIs can be called. You can even link out to API docs in your specs.

You currently can’t see the generated code, but we are working on enabling it. Of course, we don’t claim any ownership of the generated code and will gladly let you export it and continue building elsewhere.

Specific is free to try and we are really eager to hear your feedback on it!

Try it here: https://app.specific.dev

6 comments

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wslh
Sorry but looking forward to the open source version. With all due respect to your work I assume that what you are building will be quickly reproduced as OSS. Also, for a backend I think a typical entity relationship definition or declarative DSL are better than AI (e.g. deterministic and less error/security prone).
michaelmior
I'm curious if you do anything to control how the code evolves over time. Test suites are often incomplete and it's possible that behavior that is not fully specified may be unintentionally relied on.

If Specific regenerates code from the spec each time (which I'm not sure it does), there's the potential for different code each time even for parts of the spec that haven't changed. This seems like a nightmare for maintainability and debugability.

Yondle
I'm struggling to understand who or what this is for. The example shows creating an API, which is something that a technical person would understand the requirements for, but then it completely hides the generated output that the person just has to just... trust I guess. I feel this type of product has already been made redundant by 'agentic development environments' like Warp. (which have all the same issues lol)
e38383
The page is a bit sparse ;)

What will the pricing be after the beta? And what are you exactly offering? Only a database or also authentication or storage?

Can you maybe compare it to something established like Supabase?

hbrn
Funny, I've spoken about something like this to a colleague couple weeks ago. This could be a future of software development we're headed towards, if the DX is done right.

There are definitely cases where the spec is much easier to understand than the code that implements it.

Think systems with complex lifecycles or lots of required boilerplate.

Have you thought of embedding the specs into existing code?

E.g.

  # @spec: if any method takes longer than 1s to execute, a warning must be logged

  class X: ...
9dev
What I find intriguing about this, from a conceptual point of view, is how similar the workflow is to the evolution of biological life.

Passing tests is a measure for the fitness of the system; how it achieves this goal doesn't matter. The code itself might be awful, or only work due to side effects or emergent properties, but it works!