This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Rebecca Respawn
After months of building, documenting, and re-explaining the same boundaries, I realized something:
there were no real rules for protecting intentional architecture in open creative systems.
That’s how Spec-Kit and OpenSpec were born — not from theory, but from exhaustion.
Too many hours lost to random “vibe code,” overwritten logic, and unaligned contributions that turned every rebuild into a recovery cycle.
Each incident meant more compute, more subscription costs, more nights without sleep.
This isn’t about artistic frustration — it’s infrastructure loss.
Time, energy, and money are measurable resources.
Every redundant AI generation or mismatched pull request burns electricity, bandwidth, and concentration that should be building coherence.
That’s why I started developing my own libraries and system at bekalah.github.io/cathedral — to stop the cycle.
To build an art–science framework that holds form under complexity instead of collapsing under automation noise.
Spec-Kit and OpenSpec exist to make authorship enforceable at the system level — not as a philosophical idea, but as a structural safeguard.
They define boundaries so collaboration doesn’t turn into entropy.
The real challenge isn’t creativity. It’s endurance.
Keeping coherence across weeks of rebuilds, managing power use, paying for subscriptions, and still finding time to think clearly.
It’s easy to romanticize “infinite generation.” It’s harder to maintain one working system that won’t destroy itself through misuse.
So that’s what I’m doing: building libraries that teach sustainability through architecture.
If I can get through the exhaustion long enough to stabilize it, the result will be something that runs cleanly — fewer wasted cycles, less manual repair- and not slipping into such exhaustion it causes actual physical illness.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Rebecca Respawn
Rebecca Respawn | Sciencx (2025-10-24T18:03:20+00:00) The Cost of Clarity: Building Libraries For Artists. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/10/24/the-cost-of-clarity-building-libraries-for-artists/
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