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chrisrickard

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Better software specs == better software. Founder and CEO of http://userdoc.fyi

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twitter.com 1y ago

So people are calling the death of Indie Hacking?

chrisrickard
2pts0
userdoc.fyi 2y ago

Automate your internal workflows with AI (first)

chrisrickard
2pts0
chat.openai.com 2y ago

UI to User Stories

chrisrickard
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: To Langchain or not to Langchain

chrisrickard
2pts0
userdoc.fyi 3y ago

Show HN: Userdoc – My new startup after selling my development agency

chrisrickard
9pts8
userdoc.fyi 3y ago

Show HN: I built a modern user-friendly requirements management system

chrisrickard
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userdoc.fyi 3y ago

Show HN: Userdoc – The source of truth for your project requirements

chrisrickard
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userdoc.fyi 3y ago

Show HN: The Source of Truth for Your Project Requirements

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www.devtoagency.com 4y ago

Why dev agencies can thrive in a recession

chrisrickard
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www.devtoagency.com 4y ago

Agencies and Freelancers: Recurring revenue is your best friend

chrisrickard
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daedtech.com 4y ago

Keywords 101: Difficulty, Volume, and Segmentation

chrisrickard
3pts0
www.devtoagency.com 4y ago

Living User Story Documentation

chrisrickard
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www.devtoagency.com 4y ago

Freelancers and Agencies: Compete on Quality

chrisrickard
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www.devtoagency.com 5y ago

Freelancers and Agencies: Increase Sales with Project Workshops

chrisrickard
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news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: Why are software developers not more like lawyers?

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www.devtoagency.com 5y ago

Small Can Be Great

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www.devtoagency.com 5y ago

Freelancers and Agencies: Think Niche

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news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: How do you scope software projects and gather requirements?

chrisrickard
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news.ycombinator.com 11y ago

Ask HN: Who Should We Hire Next?

chrisrickard
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docs.google.com 11y ago

A quick, nerdy, anonymous survey

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news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Code generation tools?

chrisrickard
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chrisrickard.com 12y ago

My first true love, Javascript.

chrisrickard
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chrisrickard.com 12y ago

Automate the setup of your development environment

chrisrickard
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news.ycombinator.com 12y ago

Ask HN: Your ideal laptop?

chrisrickard
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news.ycombinator.com 13y ago

Ask HN: Do software agencies need a niche?

chrisrickard
2pts2
chrisrickard.github.com 13y ago

My experience with a startup accelerator

chrisrickard
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geekascii.com 13y ago

Hackers & the endless search for self-improvement

chrisrickard
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 14y ago

Ask HN: Most valuable use of time during an incubator/accelerator

chrisrickard
4pts1
github.com 14y ago

VisualPHPUnit - A PHPUnit GUI

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www.rocketcharts.com 14y ago

Rocketcharts - Awesome open-source HTML5 financial charts

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1pts1

I’ve found it interesting too.

It’s like I spent 20 years mastering painting in watercolour… nerding out on other painters, canvas options, even the backstory on some guy that makes a specific paint etc.

And I don’t regret any of that. but now I’m just loving creating my art 100x faster.

I thought I loved the craft (and I did) but more, I loved the product.

Agent Skills 6 months ago

Skills are chainable e.g. skill A can invoke skill B and then decide to invoke skill C etc… I don’t believe your slash commands can do this?

I’m working on Userdoc, a spec-driven development workspace.

Break down your software requirements (Userdoc guides you through the process), refine/confirm, setup your technical specs, coding/business guidelines & guardrails, and then create development plans (specs) which can be easily consumed by coding agents via MCP, or by platforms like Lovable / v0 using Markdown. Working on Cursor background agent integration atm.

https://userdoc.com

Vibe engineering 10 months ago

Your second point “planning in advance” could be referred to as spec-driven development… it’s a funny term in a sense (didn’t we always do that?), but I think your 7th point drives it home “a very weird form of management” - clear instructions, necessary context, and actionable feedback. As far as written words go, much more like waterfall than agile.

This is why AI development will be huge in the “Buy vs Build” space… Businesses (with a capable tech team)can build the 20% of the SaaS they need, and stop paying for the 80% every single month.

We are tackling this at https://userdoc.fyi - we help you build your specs (epics, stories, acceptance criteria, tech notes, test cases, etc) - then you can generate what we call Dev Plans, one or more requirement layers for implementation.

e.g maybe a dev plan is all your authentication feature requirements, or in the house of analogy – all the requirements for the rooms, but with instructions to actually just first build the floor, and the walls.

Dev plans then slice the reqs into meaningful units of work, as mentioned in the article – a feature/story, is often too large of a checkpoint, or often needs to be implemented in collaboration with other features/stories, so it understands the correct architectural context,.

You can then implement Dev plans over MCP, or copy to .md for tools like Lovable or V0.

Tools like Userdoc (https://userdoc.fyi) help in a few ways, you can easily create requirements (stories, personas, journeys, test cases), but also reverse engineer existing source code into detailed docs, then ask natural language questions etc. AI helps us plan our product in Userdoc, and our devs connect via MCP to bring those requirements directly in to Cursor (full disclaimer, I work at Userdoc - but we eat our own dogfood)

Userdoc is primarily around building and maintaining software requirements, so we don't do competitor research, or watch market trends etc.

But we can import any info you already have (documents etc), and have an interactive wizard to break it down into features (stories, epics, NFRs, test cases, personas, journeys) then create detailed acceptance criteria for each feature.

We can also take existing source code, and reverse engineer that into detailed documentation.

I think at a high level you’re correct.

But no matter how much “vibe” is in the code, businesses still need to create, validate, review, and approve software requirements.

This is what we help with at Userdoc.fyi - AI augmented requirements, where humans are the input and the glue, but AI does the heavy lifting.

You then integrate the requirements into Cursor, Copilot, Aider, whatever - and then use vibe coding to build POC, and perhaps vibe engineering to take it to production.

Even though Marc is probably not feeling awesome about all this negative attention, I think it’s a good time for giving all indie hackers a wake-up call around better security posture, so appreciate the article. This week you could probably create the Indie Hacker‘s dream by selling it as an online course