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OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

openspec.dev

41–50 of 73 posts

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#41
post #28

I just have it write a checklist file in /tmp (or a todo folder if I want to keep it), and check off items as it finishes them. Seems to work fine. Is this really needed?

/tmp? What happens when you reboot?

You know

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#43

Haven’t we moved on from these things? Most recent LLMs have been trained on enough long context tasks to have become pretty good at planning. Perhaps with contributions from the harness. In either case, I wouldn’t bother if I were using Codex or Claude Code.

That's what I thought too. I used speckit quite a bit before and I've had mixed results at best. You are just moving ambiguity and code review from one place to another without really gaining anything.

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#44

Haven’t we moved on from these things? Most recent LLMs have been trained on enough long context tasks to have become pretty good at planning. Perhaps with contributions from the harness. In either case, I wouldn’t bother if I were using Codex or Claude Code.

That's what I thought too. I used speckit quite a bit before and I've had mixed results at best. You are just moving ambiguity and code review from one place to another without really gaining anything.

I just rely on a log of user messages, all messages the user typed in a project as raw data and do a pass with agents to synthesize intent. Then use this for planning and validation of code. I think the user messages are the most valuable data in a project for this reason. Doing this reflection pass on messages takes just a few minutes even for thousands of messages. It keeps global perspective which is often lost in local work.

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#45
I too felt the need for some structure around AI coding, and created a spec-based tool earlier this year: https://www.shipsmooth.net/. I'm happy using it. I think of it as "light-weight" and encouraging iterative development over specs+code. It creates just one spec file and one "tasks" file for each unit of work. Available as a plugin for Claude, Codex etc.

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#46
post #5

This is my first time seeing openspec, and it seems to share a similar philosophy to what I've been working on this year. If you like this / SDD, I'd appreciate your feedback: https://github.com/spekk-ai/spekk-cli Similar iterative specs philosophy. Ours is a bit different because we focus on declarative specs and installable agent skills. We chose Go for simplicity and minimal requirements (single binary).

I did a similar thing. Yours seems cleaner than mine. I have a 'compiler' and a sexp based DSL. I don't know how anybody vibecodes medium or large programs, say above 50,000 lines of code. I don't read all the spec until I sense something is out of alignment.

Ive wondered if I have too much complexity, and from time to time I do a "prompt astrology reset" where I get rid of all the extra cruft. I can't go without the spec sheets though.

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#47
Looks like this will be a hard sell for many orgs who are already struggling with explosion of artifacts on JIRA, sharepoint, github, etc. Also, most of them have somewhat settled on some ways (in past 6-8 months) to produce AI first specs and work with them.

Also, this looks like something which leadership level folks need to adopt first and then somehow it needs to trickle down to PI planning and sprint planning. Would like to hear someone's experience on how this has got adopted in their org.

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#48
post #47

Looks like this will be a hard sell for many orgs who are already struggling with explosion of artifacts on JIRA, sharepoint, github, etc. Also, most of them have somewhat settled on some ways (in past 6-8 months) to produce AI first specs and work with them. Also, this looks like something which leadership level folks need to adopt first and then somehow it needs to trickle down to PI planning and sprint planning. W…

I use it at a much smaller scale. I think that's also the right place, because its a CLI tool + skills that generate md files. Not something you'd give to a business person. I start from a single ticket (sometimes just a handful of changes, but I want the spec as docs) to changes that you'd normally split over several tickets.

Basically the flow proposal -> design -> specs -> tasks gives you and AI a method to build context on what you want to achieve. In a way you're just creating a plan/big prompt that is structured in such a way that they start stacking on each other.

The power is that you do a lot of upfront thinking. In my team we then share it with a colleague who will review it through a PR. After that implementation is usually hands off. At the end there is a skill to verify the change against specs. I do still review the code myself too.

I guess if you work in a task oriented environment this will not work as well, as you'd lack/don't care about the business context. I'd like to think that most software development does not happen like this, but is done by engineers who actually understand why something is needed and take that into account when designing and building the solution.

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#49

This section https://openspec.dev/docs/setup links to "Concepts" Concepts links here: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/blob/main/docs-lab/gu... All the docs here are the templates rather than the actual file (I presume: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/blob/main/docs/concep... ) Somehow not very confidence inspiring...

Hey, maintainer here, the other reply got it right. We recently re-wrote the entire docs from scratch and we added some placeholders for other pieces of documentation we wanted to fill in, but it seems like some of the placeholder links stayed. Will update this!

Re: OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

#50
post #47

Looks like this will be a hard sell for many orgs who are already struggling with explosion of artifacts on JIRA, sharepoint, github, etc. Also, most of them have somewhat settled on some ways (in past 6-8 months) to produce AI first specs and work with them. Also, this looks like something which leadership level folks need to adopt first and then somehow it needs to trickle down to PI planning and sprint planning. W…

OpenSpec maintainer here. A lot of our adoption has mainly been bottoms-up, it's usually driven by engineers. That being said it definitely helps if everyone on the team uses it together. Especially when shifting left and doing a lot more "spec review".
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