From Code Review to Spec-Driven Contracts: A Vision for Auditable AIWare Systems

Mohammad Hamdaqa, Moataz Chouchen

Keywords: AIWare, Auditability, Specifications, Contracts, Behavioral commitments

Abstract:

AI-driven software systems are increasingly developed through rapid, iterative practices that combine large language models, prompt engineering, and ad-hoc integration of external tools and services; a style often described as vibe coding. While these practices enable fast experimentation and deployment, they challenge the basic principles of software engineering. Documentation is informal and quickly outdated, requirements are often implicit, and code review and testing are applied to artifacts that only partially determine system behavior. As a result, critical questions about whether a system behaved as intended, permitted, or prohibited cannot be reliably answered after deployment.
This paper presents a vision for spec-driven, contract-based AIWare systems in which specifications function as explicit communicative commitments defining required, permitted, and forbidden behavior. We argue that auditability cannot be achieved through code review alone, and instead requires specifications that are enforceable across continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, runtime execution, and post-hoc audit. We introduce a contract-driven framework structured around specification, execution, and audit planes, extend it with spec-driven CI/CD integration, and illustrate the approach through walkthrough examples. Our vision reframes auditability as a first-class system property and specifications as the authoritative source of correctness in AIWare systems.

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Paper Type: Short papers (i.e., vision, new ideas, and position papers). 2–4 pages

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Submission Number: 42