The Complexity Wall: My Half-Day Experiment with Spec-Driven Development (SDD)

How a simple bias highlighter became a 96-task enterprise project in 4 hours
TL;DR
I spent a half-day (4-5 hours) experimenting with Spec-Driven Development using the spec-kit framework on GitHub. I gave it a simple project idea - a Chrome extension to highlight bias in news articles - but my overly complex project description led to a 96-task implementation plan that completely missed the point. The lesson: Even the input to SDD frameworks matters enormously.
The Experiment Setup
I wanted to test Spec-Driven Development, specifically using spec-kit integrated with Claude Code. The idea wasn't exactly simple: build a Chrome extension that highlights obviously biased language in news articles, but I had faith SDD would be able to handle it.
Instead of just building it with a light vibe coding session, I decided to feed this into the spec-kit framework to see what SDD would produce.