October 27, 2025
Read Time: ~6 minutes
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<aside> 📎 Your AI is only as good as the ticket you hand it. We dig into how vague requirements sabotage both humans and machines, why Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria act as a clarity multiplier, and how the simple Given-When-Then structure turns fuzzy intent into something AI can reliably execute. If you're leading teams, working with AI agents, or just tired of reviewing PRs that “technically work” but miss the point, this is your guide to writing tickets that actually get the right thing built.
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https://open.spotify.com/episode/2KkxvJefxxOZBjp8e2L833?si=HaBev4CXTQCFgJXxoIChrA
Suppose you’re about to point your AI agent at a ticket you want implemented…
Give it an empty ticket with just a title, and the odds are high that you’ll get garbage out.
Give it a vague description of the problem, and it’ll go off in unwanted directions; you’ll spend hours going in circles clarifying what you intended.
So how do we keep your AI agent on task? Allow me to introduce Behavior Driven Development (BDD) acceptance criteria.
BDD is an approach to writing structured acceptance criteria that is accessible to technical and non-technical audiences alike. Crucially, it describes the intended behaviour of a change, without being prescriptive of the implementation.
Give your AI agent BDD-style acceptance criteria, and it will have everything it needs to ensure the changes it makes will satisfy the expectations of what was originally intended.
BDD focuses on an "articulate before you build" mindset, by giving you a simple framework for expressing acceptance criteria, in the form of: