Delta: Closing the Specification Gap — A Prompt Engineering Framework for Enterprise Software Teams (Acuity Press, July 25, 2026). A free, Creative-Commons-licensed book on specification-first AI-assisted development: the Ten Laws, the Specification Frame, and 100+ recipes for code that survives regulated production — money, security, compliance, concurrency. PDF & EPUB, no signup, no payment — and no reader, store, or library ever pays.
Context not provided is context invented by the model — incorrectly.
Every public-facing AI feature is an injection surface until proven otherwise.
I spent about $20 testing what a billion-dollar industry only claims.
A pre-registered, paired evaluation of the Specification Frame: 50 regulated-domain backend tasks, five frontier models from five vendors, each task generated once from the bare prompt and once with a one-page specification in front of it, one attempt per output. Defects in nine named classes fell from 148 to 23. Every model improved, none got worse, and Bandit, an independent security scanner, agreed (53 issues to 11). Total API cost under $20. Every output, checker, and the pre-registration are public.
Preprint: 10.5281/zenodo.22830263 (arXiv identifier follows the announcement) · Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.22598204 · Code: github.com/sandeep-dhuri/specification-frame · Full page: acuity.press/data
Images (free to use with credit "Sandeep Dhuri, acuity.press"): paired design · per-model result · the $20 card · two clocks · stale context timeline · rule half-life (illustrative)
Short (50w): Sandeep Dhuri is an author and independent researcher with two decades of enterprise software experience across financial services, healthcare, and insurance. Delta distills that experience into a specification-first discipline for AI-assisted development. He publishes at acuity.press.
Longer (120w): Sandeep Dhuri has spent twenty years building and reviewing enterprise software in regulated industries — the systems where "almost right" code fails audits, loses money, or leaks data. As AI assistants moved into professional development, he watched the same failure pattern repeat at machine speed: fluent code, missing constraints. Delta names that pattern the specification gap and offers a working discipline against it — ten laws, one repeatable Frame, and a hundred field recipes. The book is free and openly licensed because the discipline matters more than the margin. He writes in a personal capacity; the views are his own.
ISBN (ebook) 979-8-9964807-1-5 · ISBN (print, reserved) 979-8-9964807-0-8 · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21584309 · License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Formats: PDF, EPUB (36-page HTML edition on this site) · Library availability: OverDrive & Vivlio Libraries at $0 · Also archived: Internet Archive · Open Library.
Cover (1600×2399): download · Social card: 1200×630 · All text quotable under the license with attribution. Press & permissions: sandeep@acuity.press (or permissions@acuity.press).
