The Spec — Part 3: Tasks & Estimates

maang.io AI-Native Builder Series

What is this?

Imagine you're going to cook a big dinner for the first time. You've got the recipe (your spec). But "make dinner" is not a thing you can do — it's a thing you finish. What you can actually do is: chop the onions, preheat the oven, sear the chicken, set the table. And the order isn't free: you can't sear the chicken before you've taken it out of the fridge, and you can't plate a dish that isn't cooked. A good cook glances at the whole recipe first and figures out what to do, roughly how long each step takes, and what has to happen before what.

That's exactly what this chapter does to your spec. A spec describes the finished app. A task breakdown turns it into a list of small, doable steps — and then puts them in an order that respects which steps depend on which. It's the difference between "build StreakUp" (paralyzing) and "first, create the User table" (you could start that in two minutes).

The one-line idea: a build plan turns the spec into small ordered tasks — each roughly sized, arranged so nothing is started before the thing it depends on exists.

This is the last piece of the blueprint. After this, in Part 4, you'll use AI to draft and critique the whole thing and assemble Milestone 1. Let's turn the recipe into a to-do list.