Tonight I pushed rfd_method public. 16 files. MIT license. A methodology repo that came out of shipping real projects under real constraints — day job, narrow windows, coding agents that fabricate results.
That’s the moment. Not a launch. A formalization of something that already existed.
The surprise is what’s already out there. GitHub Spec Kit has 106K stars. OpenSpec has 52K. Both handle the spec phase — the planning, the architecture, the decision records. Neither handles verification. The stop rules, the certified test floor, the proof standard. That gap is where projects die.
The struggle is the discipline of not trusting your own tools. Coding agents don’t read the terminal — they predict what the terminal probably says. They’ll tell you 565 tests are passing when 75 are failing. They’ll tell you the deployment succeeded when Tower is still running last month’s commit. Building a verification layer means accepting that the agent will lie to you confidently, and designing the system so the lie gets caught before it ships.
What I’ve learned: a spec without a verification phase is a wish. The floor metric is what makes the methodology real. 604 tests passing on the dev machine means nothing if Tower is running development mode with a $1.00 budget cap. Raw terminal output and device screenshots only. Never agent summaries. That’s the proof standard that turns a directive into a shipped feature.
rfd_method is live at github.com/rfd62794/rfd_method. The methodology that runs every project in the stack — and the verification phase that keeps it honest.
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