SPECMINE Indexes 470,795 Spec Files Across 73,030 GitHub Repositories, the First Scale Look at Spec-Driven Development

arXiv 2608.25202·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

Agarwal and Vasilescu census the artifacts produced by the spec-driven development tooling wave (GitHub Spec Kit, OpenSpec, AWS Kiro and others): 470,795 spec.md/specs.md files across 73,030 repositories attributed to 17 named tools, plus a separate Kiro census of 98,574 files across 12,910 repositories in its requirements/design/tasks layout. Each spec carries full repository metadata, complete commit history, and parsed document structure. They also sweep every PR touching a spec in 10-star-plus repositories for 11 tools, capturing 5,992 PRs across 581 repositories with changesets, and index 2,421,323 typed references including 1.28M to code files.