[HN Gopher] Show HN: Specific (YC F25) - Build backends with spe...
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Show HN: Specific (YC F25) - Build backends with specifications
instead of code
Hi folks! Iman and I (Fabian) have been building Specific for a
while now and are finally opening up our public beta. Specific is
a platform for building backend APIs and services entirely through
natural-language specifications and tests, without writing code. We
then automatically turn your specs into a working system and deploy
it for you, along with any infrastructure needed. We know a lot of
developers who have already adopted spec-driven development to
focus on high-level design and let coding agents take care of
implementation. We are attempting to take this even further by
making the specs themselves the source of truth. Of course, we
can't blindly trust coding agents to follow the spec, so we also
support adding tests that will run to ensure the system behaves as
expected and to avoid regressions. There is so much ground to
cover, so we are focusing on a smaller set of initial features that
in our experience should cover a large portion of backends: - An
HTTP server for each project. Authentication can be added by simply
stating in the spec how you want to protect your endpoint. - A
database automatically spun up and schema configured if the spec
indicates persistence is needed. - External APIs can be called.
You can even link out to API docs in your specs. You currently
can't see the generated code, but we are working on enabling it. Of
course, we don't claim any ownership of the generated code and will
gladly let you export it and continue building elsewhere. Specific
is free to try and we are really eager to hear your feedback on it!
Try it here: https://app.specific.dev
Author : fabianlindfors
Score : 18 points
Date : 2025-10-15 17:21 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (specific.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (specific.dev)
| wslh wrote:
| Sorry but looking forward to the open source version. With all
| due respect to your work I assume that what you are building will
| be quickly reproduced as OSS. Also, for a backend I think a
| typical entity relationship definition or declarative DSL are
| better than AI (e.g. deterministic and less error/security
| prone).
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| That's fair! We have considered how we could offer an open-
| source version of Specific but haven't found a good model for
| it yet. We are definitely open to it though!
|
| Curious to hear more about the entity relationship definition.
| The schema for the entities and relationships is naturally an
| important part of it but how do you define the logic needed
| around them? For example integrations with external APIs
| wslh wrote:
| Thank you for your kind reply. Now that you mention
| integrations with external APIs, I think it's fair to say
| that you should highlight that upfront in your webpage
| because it's a more clear pain point than building other
| parts of backends.
|
| My two cents: in my experience with integrations there are
| many issues that you can't control yourself because third-
| party APIs are buggy, incomplete, etc. For top APIs there
| are, in general, good wrappers with tests to use.
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| > I think it's fair to say that you should highlight that
| upfront in your webpage because it's a more clear pain
| point than building other parts of backends.
|
| Good point! We should do that :)
|
| > My two cents: in my experience with integrations there
| are many issues that you can't control yourself because
| third-party APIs are buggy, incomplete, etc
|
| Yes, I have actually spent a large portion of my career
| building such integrations and Specific has grown out of
| that. In my experience, working with specifications makes
| it much easier to focus on the behaviour of the API you are
| integrating with, instead of the code architecture or
| boilerplate behind your integration.
| michaelmior wrote:
| I'm curious if you do anything to control how the code evolves
| over time. Test suites are often incomplete and it's possible
| that behavior that is not fully specified may be unintentionally
| relied on.
|
| If Specific regenerates code from the spec each time (which I'm
| not sure it does), there's the potential for different code each
| time even for parts of the spec that haven't changed. This seems
| like a nightmare for maintainability and debugability.
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| That's a good question!
|
| > If Specific regenerates code from the spec each time (which
| I'm not sure it does), there's the potential for different code
| each time even for parts of the spec that haven't changed
|
| It doesn't. When the spec changes, the coding agent takes the
| diff and turns it into the equivalent change to the codebase.
| The tests also run each time so that the coding agent does
| cause a regression as part of this. Although as you say, test
| suites are often incomplete. We are aiming to make it easier to
| build complete test suites in Specific than in regular code
| though because they are a part of the spec and the agent can
| you help write them as well.
|
| We haven't done much yet in this area but I'm quite excited
| about how to evolve the codebase over time. I think we have an
| advantage in that a system evolving also means the specs are
| evolving and growing. We can maintain a loose mapping behind
| the scenes between specs and code for the coding agent, to give
| it the right context and keep code changes localised even as a
| system grows large. We can also refactor incrementally as we go
| as given that it becomes the job of the coding agent, instead
| of a human that might put it off.
| Yondle wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand who or what this is for. The example
| shows creating an API, which is something that a technical person
| would understand the requirements for, but then it completely
| hides the generated output that the person just has to just...
| trust I guess. I feel this type of product has already been made
| redundant by 'agentic development environments' like Warp. (which
| have all the same issues lol)
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| That's a fair take. We are planning on showing the output code
| to remove that need for trust, but focused on other things for
| the open beta.
|
| As for who it's for, we are targeting technical people who
| might know how to build backends in code, but we believe it can
| be done more productively through specs. The specs remove the
| need for boilerplate code and more closely match the business
| requirements of the system. One common example of this amongst
| our users is building third-party integrations. That can
| require a lot of boilerplate code and libraries to achieve. In
| Specific, it can be as easy as linking out to API docs.
| e38383 wrote:
| The page is a bit sparse ;)
|
| What will the pricing be after the beta? And what are you exactly
| offering? Only a database or also authentication or storage?
|
| Can you maybe compare it to something established like Supabase?
| fabianlindfors wrote:
| Ah yes, we haven't spent as much effort on it as we could.
| Mostly been building the product itself!
|
| Pricing is still to be determined. I imagine we will charge for
| infra usage (processing, storage, etc) in line with other
| providers like Supabase. We will also charge per-seat for
| developing inside Specific, which will likely be a fixed price
| with some token usage limit.
|
| As for what's part of the beta, we currently offer hosting for
| the API and processing of requests, as well as a database to
| back it. We are planning on expanding that to support more use
| cases like background jobs, cron jobs, and object storage.
|
| We don't offer built-in authentication and aren't planning to
| at this point. That's because we think there are much better
| providers (like Auth0, Clerk, WorkOS) that you can easily
| integrate in your Specific app by just specifying it!
|
| That's the main difference to something like Supabase. We
| provide the infra automatically for your app to do what you
| need it to, but aren't opinionated around user-facing aspects
| like authentication. We also have the opportunity to be quite a
| bit more flexible. Building integrations with external APIs on
| Supabase for example often requires writing edge functions. In
| Specific, you can simply make it part of your specification.
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