Source Catalog

A working bibliography for The Parallel Development Book.

Currency policy: this book's practices are sourced from the last six months of public writing at time of drafting — roughly October 2025 through April 2026. AI coding practice moves fast; what was leading-edge in early 2025 is often stale by late 2025. Sources older than six months are included only when (a) the underlying argument is structural and durable (e.g., Hillel Wayne on the limits of testing, Ousterhout on software design) or (b) the piece is the ancestor of a current practice and worth citing as history, in which case it is explicitly labeled as such.

Every citation below is dated. If a date is in the past six months relative to April 2026, it is treated as current practice. If it is older, it is explicitly noted as historical or durable structural reference.

Companion Artifacts

Current Practice (Oct 2025 – April 2026)

Spec-Driven Development and Plan Mode

The dominant 2026 framework for requirement alignment and correctness contracts.

AGENTS.md engineering

The 2026 cross-tool standard, replacing tool-specific CLAUDE.md / .cursorrules.

Recent capability landmarks

Pioneer practices, last six months

Boris Cherny (Claude Code creator) — Dec 2025 X thread and tips:

Mitchell Hashimoto — Feb 2026 adoption memoir:

Armin Ronacher — Jan–Feb 2026 Pi/OpenClaw series:

Addy Osmani — Dec 2025 / 2026 workflow posts:

Geoffrey Huntley — Ralph Loop methodology (ongoing, materially current):

Cognition / Devin — multi-agent principles:

Simon Willison — ongoing practice blog:

Historical Ancestors (pre-Oct 2025, included for context)

These are the 2024–early 2025 practices that led to the current consensus. Cite them as history — they are not current practice.

  • Harper Reed — My LLM codegen workflow atm (Feb 2025). The three-file pattern (spec.md + prompt_plan.md + todo.md) whose prompts are structurally still sound but whose lack of verification criteria and interface specification make it incomplete by 2026 SDD standards. Cited as ancestor in Chapter 3.
  • Aider — Separating code reasoning and editing (Sep 2024). The architect/editor split was the first production articulation of "specify first, implement second" — but the current consensus (Plan Mode + SDD + Adversarial Agent) has moved substantially beyond it. Not cited in current chapters.

Skeptical / Critical Voices

Deliberately engaged rather than avoided.

Durable Structural References (intentionally older)

These are older than the six-month window but are cited for structural claims that do not become stale.

  • John Ousterhout — A Philosophy of Software Design (2018/2021). Cited in Chapter 5 for the core engineering-discipline principles.
  • Kent Beck — Test-Driven Development: By Example (2002). Cited in Chapter 4 as the TDD reference TPD contrasts with.
  • Hillel Wayne on the limits of testing and formal methods (2018–2024). Cited in Chapter 4:
  • Will Larson — An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer. Background for Chapter 9.
  • Ethan Mollick — Co-Intelligence. Touchpoint for Chapter 10.

Tools Referenced

If you are reading this book on GitHub and know of a recent (<6 months) source that belongs here, pull requests are welcome.