Requirement Ledger

A requirement ledger is a retrospective requirements record: instead of writing a specification before you prompt an AI agent, you mine the conversation you already had and reconstruct what you actually required. Its evidence trail is the transcript, a test log, and a read-only Git snapshot — and your last correction beats your first prompt. Why do vibe-coded projects lose their requirements? They lose them because the intent was never written down in the first place — it lived in the chat window, and the chat window closes. A prompt is not a requirement document. It is a compressed instruction to a system that fills in every gap with a plausible guess, and the guesses are what you end up shipping. ...

Vibe coding lets you ship software by describing what you want in plain language, but the real failure isn’t bad code — it’s requirement drift. You start with a clear intent, and within a few long sessions the goal quietly buries itself under debugging noise, and neither the model nor you can reconstruct what you actually wanted. A requirement ledger — a versioned record of intent, constraints, and decisions kept in the repository — externalizes that memory and keeps every new session anchored to the original purpose. ...