How CLAD Works

Exceptional experiences begin with prototyping and development, but the journey continues well beyond that. Once built, you need to test, optimize, publish, and learn from how people use your Lens.

CLAD (Closed Loop Agentic Development) automates and supports your entire experience development lifecycle, empowering you to move faster with AI as your co-developer.

Design & Prototype

In this phase, CLAD will build out a starting point for your experience: building out the Lens scene, generating assets, writing scripts, and more.

You can ask CLAD to quickly set up a scene by describing — in any level of detail — what you’re looking for.

Example prompt: “create a bunch of planets to represent the solar system.”

Though CLAD can build full experiences from scratch, it can also refine an existing project.

Example prompt: “add scripts or shaders to make the experience more engaging.”

CLAD understands SPECS-specific capabilities.

In this example, it’s leveraging SPECS UI Kit and displays information from AI endpoints.

Testing, Migration & Optimization

As the experience is being built, CLAD can simulate camera movement to see various perspectives, test interactions live in the preview, and iterate until behavior matches your intent.

Note: Since AI will be building your Lens live in Lens Studio, you can watch along as it interacts with your Preview panel.

CLAD can also use LEAF (Lens Evaluation & Automation Framework), which allows AI to write its own scenario and integration tests for your Lens.

Tip: Because these unit tests are written as scripts, you can run them as you continue to develop your Lens without relying on AI every time.

CLAD can generate tests and run them automatically as it builds the Lens.

For example, if you are making a note-taking experience, AI will double-check that the code it wrote actually did what it intended.

You have access to what CLAD creates so that you can reuse and modify it.

For example, in the case of LEAF, you can run the generated scenarios through the LEAF panel directly.

In the testing phase, you can even simulate hand movements and gestures to ensure your interactions work as expected.

For example, here CLAD created a scenario in LEAF to test the two-hand pinch-and-drag to resize an object.

In addition to testing, CLAD will also help you optimize your Lens by looking at your existing assets, profiling performance, and applying targeted fixes.

Agentic optimization is a time-intensive, human-like process that systematically improves project performance while preserving visual parity.

The agent produces charts showing where your Lens is using system resources to target areas for performance investigations.

The agent captures images before and after applying a performance optimization to ensure that changes do not result in visual regressions.

If you have existing projects, CLAD can also bring them into SPECS. For example, it can migrate your existing Lens onto SPECS APIs and improve runtime performance.

A complex Lens originally designed for Spectacles, brought to SPECS and running at a higher FPS on device after being optimized.

“A Sand Simulation simulating thousands of grains” running efficiently in C++, built and brought into SPECS through SpecsNDK using CLAD, running on device.

Publishing

When you’re ready, you can ask CLAD to publish your Lens for discovery in the SPECS community.

Note: You will need a SPECS account to publish. Apply to the SPECS Developer Program to learn more. If you've built something cool with CLAD, you can also sign up to the CLAD Device Access there to get queued for office hours and try it on a physical device.

Post-Production

Once your Lens has been published, you can use CLAD to help you get insights on how it’s being used, as well as opportunities to iterate.

Tip: Learn what CLAD provides in each part of the process on Agents and Skills.

Tip: CLAD can also write Editor code, allowing you to customize Lens Studio with plugins for a more tailored development workflow.

SPECS Experience Builder

SPECS Experience Builder is an agent inside of the CLAD tool suite. The experience builder provides a structure for planning and building an entire interactive SPECS AR experience in one shot.

You can invoke SPECS Experience Builder by appending “Make ____ for SPECS”.

Cursor going through SPECS Experience Builder to create a one-shot Lens:

Example prompt: “Create a SPECS note taking lens”

Example output from Cursor at the end of the process.

Notice how it automatically used SPECS UI Kit, built-in capabilities (e.g. voice recognition, persistent data), and more.

An example chemistry education Lens made autonomously with CLAD, then iterated with humans in the loop.

Notice that while the Lens uses the same SPECS UI Kit, it still has its unique flavor and design.