No development method is Waterfall; it's a straw man used to describe what a given development method isn't. There's no published Waterfall development method, nor is there any evidence that any office had ever used a development method internally referred to as Waterfall.

> I’ve noticed a common misconception: spec driven development is a return to a waterfall style of software development. [It] isn’t about pulling designs up-front, it’s about pulling designs up. Making specifications explicit, versioned, living artifacts that the implementation of the software flows from, rather than static artifacts.

This seems like a straw man argument: agile wasn't without specs and waterfall wasn't without some flexibility. What is truly the difference?

> The implementation is then derived from this specification, reflecting iterative changes in the specification, by AI alone or human developers working with AI. Increasingly, these tasks are done autonomously end-to-end by AI agents.

Given that he is heavily involved in Kiro (which touts "specs" as a guided flow within the tool [0]), this is starting to make sense. I read as "take some ideas from Agile and from Waterfall, but set up for purpose of AI assistance."

[0] https://kiro.dev/docs/specs/

I love the animation, what drives it?