Otto Dev

Otto Dev is your collaborative development agent. It takes groomed stories and implements them — writing code, tests, and pull requests following your team's standards, with your team reviewing and approving every change.

What Otto Dev Does

• Feature Implementation — Takes a groomed story spec and implements the feature, following your project's patterns and conventions.
• Test Writing — Generates unit, integration, and end-to-end tests alongside the implementation.
• Pull Request Creation — Creates well-structured PRs with clear descriptions, linking back to the story spec.
• Code Review Assistance — Provides review context and can respond to PR feedback.
• Story Grooming — Helps break down epics into implementable stories with clear acceptance criteria.

Spec-Driven Development

Otto Dev's biggest differentiator is that it works from groomed story specs — not ad-hoc prompts. While generic AI coding tools respond to whatever you type, Otto Dev starts with a story that has a clear title, description, acceptance criteria, technical notes, and defined scope. Every line of code traces back to a requirement.

This is how professional development teams work. Otto automates the implementation while keeping full traceability from story to code to test to PR.

The 7-Stage Pipeline

Otto Dev requires Otto Stack to be active so it understands your tech stack. When given a story to implement:

1. Story intake — Otto Dev pulls a groomed story from the work queue. If the story isn't agent-ready (missing acceptance criteria, unclear scope), Otto flags it and assists with grooming instead of guessing.
2. Research phase — Otto reads the spec, analyzes the existing codebase for patterns and conventions, and creates an implementation plan aligned with the acceptance criteria.
3. Implementation — Code is written to satisfy each acceptance criterion. The 13 specialized agents write idiomatic code for each framework.
4. Test-to-spec — Tests are written directly against acceptance criteria — not just generic coverage. Each criterion maps to at least one test.
5. Quality gates — 12+ automated checks verify the implementation meets standards before a PR is created.
6. PR traceability — The PR description links back to the story spec, lists which acceptance criteria are satisfied, and includes the test plan.
7. Post-merge verification — Otto confirms the merged code still passes all criteria in the target branch.

Why Spec-Driven Matters

• Traceability — Every change maps to a requirement. Auditors, PMs, and reviewers can follow the chain from story → code → test → PR.
• Quality — Acceptance criteria prevent scope creep and gold-plating. Otto implements what was asked, not what it thinks is cool.
• Predictability — Teams know exactly what they'll get in each PR because it's defined upfront.
• Review efficiency — Reviewers check the PR against the spec, not against their mental model of what was requested.
• Agile alignment — Works with any work management tool: GitHub Issues, Jira, Linear, Azure DevOps, or plain markdown specs.

Specialized Agents & Quality Gates

Otto Dev coordinates 13 stack-specialized agents — React, Angular, Vue, Node.js, Spring Boot, .NET, Python, React Native, Flutter, Database, DevOps, Security, and API — each writing idiomatic code for its framework. Every change passes 12+ quality gates including linting, type checking, tests, security review, license compliance, and breaking change detection.

How Otto Teaches

Every PR Otto creates explains the patterns and conventions behind the implementation. When Otto Dev chooses an approach, it explains why — referencing your project's existing patterns and industry best practices. Your team learns by reviewing Otto's work.