Writing Specs

Writing Specs

The workflow family's shared bar for every spec a workflow produces: short, honest, on-rails. Process skills name this concept at the steps that draft or revise specs; what to draft and when stays with the referencing skill. Graph mechanics — frontmatter, link kinds, the spec_* tools — are the spec-graph skill's ground; this concept carries the quality bar the family holds on top of them, and is where the family's rules for specs and the spec graph accrue.

Short

• Small enough to read in one sitting. Target signal, not completeness.
• Explain intent, not inventory: what the thing is for, what it owns, where its boundary runs — never a file listing or a restatement of the code.

Honest

• Only settled content appears. Never pad with [TBD] or placeholder sections — a section that hasn't been settled simply doesn't exist yet.
• Anything inferred rather than confirmed is marked unconfirmed, inline, where it stands.
• New and inferred specs are status: draft until the user has reviewed them — the flip out of draft follows the user's review, never the drafting agent's own judgment. A reviewed durable spec goes active, never done: it stays in force and evolves with the project.

On-rails

• High-signal enough that a future agent (or human) lands on the decisions without re-deriving them.
• The spec is the only home for rationale: decisions, invariants, trade-offs, and bug post-mortems are recorded here, never as code comments — a rationale paragraph found in code is content to promote into the owning spec, leaving at most a one-line pointer where misediting would silently break something.
• Say each thing once: link by id instead of restating; the dependency edges between sibling modules live in the parent's spec, not in each leaf.
• One spec per genuine boundary — not per directory, not per file.

The goal doc describes the product, not a plan

goal-and-requirements is the living record of what the product is and why: its goal, problem, audience, capabilities, and non-goals, plus any durable principles.

• No versions, releases, phases, MVP/v1/v2 splits, or "later" lists. Sequencing is not a spec's job: an idea cut from scope goes back to the user to track wherever they plan work, and never into the doc.
• Capabilities state what the product does, or for a new project what its smallest useful first build will do.
• Non-goals hold only what is excluded by decision. Something neither listed nor excluded is open, not forbidden.
• It evolves with the product: a change that adds a capability or overturns a principle updates the goal doc in the same change.