8 posts tagged with "AI"

A walk-through of Hydra, Conduction's agentic app factory — the full recording is above. When you're ready to build with it, the hands-on tutorial series takes you from zero to a live Hydra run.

Spec-driven development inverts the usual order. You don't sketch the feature, write the code, then maybe document what you built. You write the specification first — in Markdown, with RFC 2119 keywords and GIVEN/WHEN/THEN scenarios — and an AI agent (Hydra) implements code that satisfies it. The human's job moves up a level: you develop context, not code.

That sounds idealistic until you see it work. Conduction's apps are built this way in production today. This tutorial walks the workflow: what OpenSpec actually is, how ADRs at organisation and app level keep features coherent, what the explore and apply skills do, and how the quality-and-gatekeeping harness validates the result before anything reaches main.

Nextcloud is standing in front of an open window. Most people, including many inside the ecosystem itself, have not yet noticed it is open. What started as a safe alternative for file storage has quietly grown into something fundamentally different. The technical reality is already that of a platform. The name is the only thing still trailing behind. And in technology, as history teaches us, naming is not cosmetic. Naming is load-bearing. Windows close.

Claude Skills are the mechanism for extending Claude Code with reusable, specialised behaviours. Think of Conduction's own /review-pr, /opsx-new, or the whole hydra-gate-* family: each one is a skill. This first part explains in ten minutes what a skill is, how it gets activated, and when you should not write one. It's part 1 of a four-part track; by the end you'll be ready to write your own in part 2 — and in part 3 we introduce the 7-level maturity framework that takes a skill from "feels good" to "measured good" (part 4 continues with L6 and L7).

In part 1 you saw what a skill is. In this part you'll write one yourself: a working git-status-summary skill that produces a readable summary of the current working tree. At the end it sits in your ~/.claude/skills/ folder, you can invoke it via /git-status-summary, and you'll know how to share it with your team.

You now have a working skill — but does it actually work well? And does it keep working when Claude itself gets upgraded or when you tweak the skill? This third, optional part shows how to evaluate a skill systematically: test scenarios, trigger tests, a baseline measurement, and the eval runner that /skill-creator sets up for you. This is the step from Maturity Level 4 ("feels right") to Level 5 ("measurably right").

In part 3 you took a skill from "feels right" to "measurably right" — Maturity Level 5. For most skills that's enough. But for a handful of skills you use daily, or that steer other skills, you want to go further: a skill that learns from its own executions (L6), and a skill that steers other agents inside a larger workflow (L7). This fourth part shows how you get there — and how the Hydra dashboard lets you monitor your whole skill library for maturity at once.

Hydra is Conduction's internal agentic CI/CD platform: a factory that turns OpenSpec proposals into reviewed, tested code on a feature branch. This module explains in ten minutes what Hydra is, why it exists, and how it fits inside our app factory. It is the first part of a six-part series; by the end you're ready for part 2 on the three pipelines.