One of the biggest friction points in distributed engineering teams isn't technical — it's the spec. Here's the format that reduced our back-and-forth significantly. The problem with most specs Most engineering specs are either too vague ("build a notification system") or too prescriptive ("use Redis pub/sub with these exact keys"). Neither works well. The first requires endless clarification before starting. The second removes the engineering judgment that makes a senior developer worth hiring. The 6-section format 1. Context (2–4 sentences) Why does this need to exist? What breaks without it? Example: "Our billing webhook handler processes all events synchronously. When Stripe sends a burst, the endpoint times out and Stripe retries, causing duplicate processing. This caused 3 support tickets this week." 2. Success criteria Observable behaviors, not implementation steps.…