Introduction

When AI writes code, specifications become your source code—the artifact you write, version, trace, and review.

The problem: Teams treat specs as throwaway documents while AI agents generate implementations in minutes. Without proper spec infrastructure, you lose control, context, and traceability in AI development workflows.

Mod is the spec layer for AI development. When agents write code, Mod ensures your specifications are versioned, collaborative, and bidirectionally traceable. Mod gives you the infrastructure to maintain control and quality as AI accelerates development.

Why

When engineering teams scale AI coding beyond 1-2 agents, existing tools break down:

1. Spec Quality Bottleneck — Product/eng teams struggle to write specifications that agents can reliably execute. Poor specs mean wasted cycles and low-quality code.
2. Lost Context and Traceability — When agents generate code, you lose the thread from business requirement → spec → implementation. Code reviews happen in a vacuum without understanding why decisions were made.
3. Serial Review Cycles Kill Velocity — Agents can generate code in minutes, but human review through GitHub PRs takes 1-2 days. Teams can't realize agent productivity gains because review becomes the bottleneck.
4. Parallel Agent Chaos — Running 3+ agents simultaneously creates merge conflicts, coordination overhead, and unclear ownership. Traditional Git workflows weren't built for this.
5. No Deployment Confidence — Without clear traceability from spec → generated code, teams can't trust what's being deployed. This slows adoption and forces manual verification.

Result: Existing tools (GitHub, Linear, Notion) were built for humans writing code. When agents write code, you need tooling for the spec layer.

Principles

1. Specifications Are the Source of Truth — When AI writes code, specs become the primary artifact teams create, review, and maintain. Code is the compiled output.
2. Real-Time Collaboration by Default — Spec generation, agent orchestration, and review happen synchronously with full visibility. No waiting on async PR cycles when agents work at machine speed.
3. Traceability from Intent to Implementation — Every line of generated code traces back to its specification and business requirement. Context is never lost between product, eng, and AI agents.
4. Integration over Replacement — Mod sits between business needs and existing dev tools (VS Code, GitHub, CI/CD). Enhance workflows rather than rebuild them.
5. Built for Parallel Agent Execution — Native support for multiple agents working simultaneously without coordination overhead or merge conflicts. CRDTs and real-time sync enable true parallelism.
6. Spec Quality Determines Output Quality — Invest tooling in helping teams write better specifications—through generation assistance, templates, validation, and iterative refinement with agent feedback.
7. Trust Through Transparency — Teams should see exactly what agents are doing, why they made decisions, and how specs translate to code. No black boxes in production systems.

Use Cases

1. Collaborative Spec Engineering — Teams collaborate on specs in real-time with full codebase context, then hand complete specs to agents for execution.
2. Parallel Agent Workflows — Run multiple agents on related features simultaneously. Mod tracks all activity and keeps context synced.
3. Context-Rich Reviews — Review implementations with original spec, iteration history, and execution context—no more isolated diffs.
4. Bidirectional Traceability — Every requirement automatically links to its implementation and every code change traces back to specs—like safety-critical engineering, but enabled by AI agents.
5. Institutional Knowledge — Build a library of specs and execution patterns that make every agent run smarter.

Get Started

• Getting Started — Install Mod and run your first collaborative spec workflow
• Spec Writing — Learn to write specifications that agents can reliably execute
• Tracing — Understand bidirectional traceability from requirements to implementation
• Review — Review agent-generated code with full spec and execution context

Get Early Access

Mod is in early access. If you're orchestrating multiple coding agents and hitting coordination bottlenecks, we'd love to work with you.

Request Access →