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Episode Description
Zak Cole has shipped four successful exits in crypto—Whiteblock, Slingshot, Code Arena, and more—and he attributes much of that success to a rigorous specification-driven development process. In this episode, Zak joins us to discuss his journey from Marine Corps cryptographic asset manager to serial Ethereum builder, and introduces Adversarial Specs, an open-source tool that uses multiple AI models to pressure-test product specifications before a single line of code is written.
We dig into Zak’s philosophy that the most expensive mistake you can make is building the wrong thing, and how getting consensus on specifications upfront can compress what used to be a two-week review cycle into a couple of hours. The conversation covers his “two pizza rule” for team size, why LLMs are better at reasoning about specifications than writing code, and the surprising finding that Grok is the laziest model when it comes to providing critical feedback.
Whether you’re a solo founder bootstrapping your next project or leading a team through a major build, this episode offers practical insights on how to ship faster by slowing down to think first.
Topics Covered
- Zak’s path from the Marine Corps to the Ethereum ecosystem
- The product development process behind four successful exits
- How Adversarial Specs pits Claude, GPT, and Gemini against each other to refine PRDs
- Why specification-driven development saves engineering hours
- Small teams, agency, and the “two pizza rule”
- The case for trusting AI with specifications over code
- Open source culture and building for external contributors
Links
- Adversarial Specs: https://github.com/0xZakk/adversarial-specs
- Zak’s website: https://crap.dev/
- Zak on X: @0xZakk