alt Hacker NewsRight, the spec/build separation is exactly the idea and Ossature is already built that way on the build side.
I agree a dedicated layer for intent capture makes a lot of sense. I thought about that as well, I am just not fully convinced it has to be conversational (or free-form conversational). Writing a prompt to get the right spec change is still a skill in itself, and it feels like it'd just be shifting the problem upstream rather than actually solving it. A structured editing experience over specs feels like it'd be more tractable to me. But the explicit vs inferred distinction you mention is interesting and worth thinking through more.
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My own approach also has intent sitting at the top: intent justifies plan justifies code justifies tests. And the other way around, tests satisfy code, satisfy plan, satisfy intent. These threads bottom up and top down are validated by judge agents.
I also make individual tasks md files (task.md) which makes them capable of carrying intent, plan, but not just checkbox driven "- [ ]" gates, they get annotated with outcomes, and become a workbook after execution. The same task.md is seen twice by judge agents which run without extra context, the plan judge and the implementation judge.
I ran tests to see which component of my harness contributes the most and it came out that it is the judges. Apparently claude code can solve a task with or without a task file just as well, but the existence of this task file makes plans and work more auditable, and not just for bugs, but for intent follow.
Coming back to user intent, I have a post user message hook that writes user messages to a project scoped chat_log.md file, which means all user messages are preserved (user text << agent text, it is efficient), when we start a new task the chat log is checked to see if intent was properly captured. I also use it to recover context across sessions and remember what we did last.
Once every 10-20 tasks I run a retrospective task that inspects all task.md files since last retro and judges how the harness performs and project goes. This can detect things not apparent in task level work, for example when using multiple tasks to implement a more complex feature, or when a subsystem is touched by multiple tasks. I think reflection is the one place where the harness itself and how we use it can be refined.
claude plugin marketplace add horiacristescu/claude-playbook-plugin
source at https://github.com/horiacristescu/claude-playbook-plugin/tree/mainclose
The spec manually crafted the user is ideal.
It's just that we're lazy. After being able to chat, I don't see people going back. You can't just paste some error into the specs, you can't paste it image and say it make it look more like this. Plus however well designed the spec, something like "actually make it always wait for the user feedback" can trigger changes in many places (even for the sake of removing contradictions).