The most important step in the old process was never written down: the confused developer getting up, walking across the room, and asking. It worked precisely because no one designed it.
Ask what could go wrong with a Spec Session and the list comes fast. Sessions that run long and never converge, especially when everyone’s trying hard to agree. The wrong people in the room, or the right people never told it was happening. A topic too big to spec in one sitting. A dominant voice drowning out the person who actually holds the knowledge.
All fair. All worth naming. None of them new.
Scrum has been fighting every one of these for twenty years. Refinement sessions that run long without a decision. The invite-list problem - who gets pulled into planning and who doesn’t. INVEST criteria exist because “this story is too big” is one of the oldest complaints in the room. Artificial harmony in a retro, where everyone nods because nobody wants to be the one who reopens the debate, is the same failure as a Spec Session converging too easily on a fake consensus.
None of this is a new failure mode invented by putting an agent on the other end of the spec. It’s the same meeting, wearing a different name.
