Demos

Getting Started with Itential Builder Skills for Spec-Driven Development

VIDEO NOTES

(So you can skip ahead, if you want.)

00:05 Itential Joins the Anthropic Claude Code Marketplace
01:13 The Five-Stage Spec-Driven Process Explained
04:41 Why This Maps to Test-Driven Development
06:33 Three Use Cases Launched in Parallel
11:47 Feasibility Report Runs Against 15,000 Platform Tasks
14:35 Solution Design Locked & Pushed to Git
16:21 Results in the Platform – Workflows Built Live
16:58 Three Production-Ready Use Cases in 45 Minutes

Building Deterministic Infrastructure Workflows with Claude Code

Vibe coding gets things started. It doesn’t get them into production. In this session, Head of AI & DevRel John Capobianco and Principal Architect Ankit Bansali show a better path: spec-driven development for network and infrastructure automation using Itential Builder Skills – available in the Anthropic Claude Code marketplace.

The idea comes from software engineering, where specs become executables. Starting from natural language requirements, the Itential Skills guide engineers through a structured five-stage process: spec, feasibility, design, build, and as-built documentation. The output isn’t a rough draft. It’s a deterministic, testable, version-controlled workflow – built in one session, ready for production.

In this live session, John and Ankit run three use cases in parallel – VPN tunnel provisioning, DNS A record management, and BGP peer provisioning with Python – to show how the process scales with complexity, and why the artifacts it produces matter just as much as the automation itself.

Check out the full length demo below for a more detailed look at how to use Itential Builder Skills for network automation.

What You’ll See:

Spec-Driven Development in Practice

Install and initialize Itential’s spec-driven development skills directly in Claude Code
Start with a constitution – high-level guardrails that govern the entire build process
Move from business requirements to structured specification files without writing a single line of code

Five-Stage Agentic Workflow

Spec Agent: gathers and structures business requirements through interactive dialogue
Solution Architect Agent: validates feasibility against existing integrations and platform capabilities
Builder Agent: translates the approved design into deterministic Itential workflows, Python services, Ansible, or OpenTofu assets
As-Built Agent: auto-generates documentation, how-to guides, and reconciliation artifacts – stored in Git

Three Use Cases, Built in Parallel

VPN tunnel provisioning: IPSec hub-and-spoke with Cisco ASAs, Netbox IPAM, and ServiceNow
DNS A record management: simple, clean, and immediately testable
BGP peer provisioning: EBGP with XR, route maps, BFD, MD5, and Netbox – a real-world complexity test

Why This Approach Matters

The Build Problem Is Solved, The Maintenance Problem Isn’t

Building automation is the easy part – for now. What breaks organizations is what happens after: the engineer who built it leaves, the documentation is incomplete, and no one can trace the code back to the original business requirement. Spec-driven development solves this. Every asset comes with its spec, its design rationale, its test cases, and its as-built documentation, all version-controlled in Git.

Deterministic Output from Probabilistic Models

AI doesn’t write perfect code every time. But spec-driven development doesn’t need it to. The process comes with guardrails built in. By the time Claude Code reaches the build stage, the requirements are locked, the design is approved, and the builder agent is following a precise plan. The determinism comes from the workflow, and the workflow is what Itential is built around.

Network Engineers Don’t Need to Learn Python to Write Python

Domain expertise is the differentiator, not Python fluency. With Itential Skills, a network engineer who has never written a Python script can define BGP peering requirements in plain language.

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Exciting news from Itential that we have now entered the Anthropic Claude Code marketplace with spec-driven development. I’m going to start with a spec-driven development at a higher level, not Itential related, just to give you a sense on what this means and an approach for you to start developing your own, you know, to move beyond vibe coding, I would say. Ankit is going to take over while my code’s running in the background and show you in 15-20 minutes how to build a very complex Itential workflow, but using this new approach. Now, what makes me really excited is that we at Itential are pushing the envelope and the boundaries here, and we’re right, we’re bringing the modern. Software development approach of spec-driven development and bringing it to infrastructure, right? We don’t need to wait five, eight, ten years to embrace artificial intelligence and very precise and secure and governed deterministic code from probabilistic models.