Learning by Failing

The idea, up front I like Kiro's spec-driven model: three files ( requirements.md , design.md , tasks.md ), an agent that walks them, work that decomposes into checkbox tasks. But I don't want the spec living in the repo. Every spec-driven tool I've tried — Kiro, GitHub Spec Kit, cc-sdd — assumes the spec is a tracked artifact in git, and that's been my hangup. Requirements belong in a ticket tracker where product people already work and where edits have an audit trail. So the experiment is: Jira is the source of truth. Claude Code reads a local mirror generated on demand. The only thing checked into the repo is one pointer file ( CLAUDE.md ) telling future sessions where to look. That's it. The rest of this post is the details — directory layout, sync mechanism, a Story-sizing lesson, what I've actually built. I'm still experimenting; some of it might be wrong. Why this and not just specs-in-repo I tried specs-in-repo first, the obvious way. It wor...