Hunting Moths

Most teams treat their AI coding agent as a junior who just needs better prompts. Two weeks, one person, three codebases — iOS, Android, and a PHP backend — and 34,000 lines of working code suggests a different frame. The agent isn't the bottleneck. The specification is. When you treat code as the source of truth and the spec as documentation, every ambiguity becomes a bug you can't categorize — not quite a defect, not quite a feature, just... a moth.

This talk inverts the relationship: code is the build artifact, the spec is the work, and a bug is a gap between specification and implementation, not bad code. Through five real moth stories from shipping the PHP Tek 2026 attendee app — the app this audience used at PHP Tek — I'll show how a single CLAUDE.md file and a /spec directory let one engineer outrun a small team, and where the model still breaks.