arXiv:2608.25202v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI coding agents implement software from naturallanguage instructions, but the intent behind that work is lost when stated only in chat sessions. Spec-driven development (SDD) addresses this by having developers and agents write specifications that guide implementation, yet evidence on its use comes largely from tool vendors. We study SDD in practice through a thematic analysis of Reddit discussions, interviews with 21 practitioners, including eight tool makers, and 266 active and popular repositories in SpecMine, a corpus of 470,795 spec files from 73,030 public GitHub repositories that we release. Practitioners agreed that specs should capture intent, but many also included implementation details, used SDD selectively and mainly for new features, and reported more reliable agent behavior alongside greater planning and review costs. Our findings show that implementation detail may help agents while making specs prone to decay, that tool-specific record structures shape what people and agents see, and that participants described spec-code checks mainly when changes are completed rather than over time. We also find that individual benefits may come from clarifying intent before delegation, while team benefits may depend on SDD becoming a shared process. We derive implications for tool builders, practitioners, and researchers.