We started with an approach like that but I think our grounding principal has been that you shouldn't have to modify your docker-compose to get parallelized local development. I think we want to layer onto your existing setup, not make you re-write your stack around us.
I haven't really had a bad experience with Docker on Mac. but Is the idea you basically just build your service on top of specific.dev's provided services (postgres and redis) and those run bare-metal locally and then you can deploy to specific.dev's hosted solution?
Yes, exactly. Probably two different focuses between us, we are more focused on providing the full environment to build productively with coding agents, from local dev all the way to prod. The key thing for us is that the agent can write code, build infrastructure and test the entire system autonomously locally, and then deploying to production should be dead simple.
A bit of a different approach from the classic use case of docker-compose that is often orthogonal to the production infrastructure in some sense.
One thing I've used to great success though is taking an existing project or example docker-compose and simply asking the coding agent to translate it to Specific's IaC. Works a treat, especially as the coding agent can read all the code at the same time and connect it all together.
(also it looks like we were in the same batch!)