OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework

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.

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 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?

I use this to produce the task list which I then feed into a Ralph loop using a bash script. I save a lot of tokens since each tasks context is so small.

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...

I have a super simple spec-based workflow. It works amazingly well. I’m amazed how well coding agents can work through what I consider large features.

Last week, I gave a 471 line spec to implement a major feature and it didn’t flinch. I wrote about it here.

https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/sojourn-for-ios-was-45-one...

This looks like exactly what I've been thinking I needed. I've tried Superpowers, GSD and oh-my-claude/openagent and mostly they burn more tokens.

Lately I've been using stock OMP and its close to the right balance but not quite enough of the brainstorming and spec maintenance built in. I've tried to layer some simple stuff on myself but with mixed results.

Even OpenSpec is too heavy for me. I do similar things but in one file, which I generate with a skill after a planning session. The important thing is to have a file reviewers can audit the code against.

What are people using for this nowadays?

There seems to be a spectrum from fluid, iterative workflows like OpenSpec to more up-front alignment and control like Matt Pocock skills.

Curious what people have settled on.

Spec-driven workflows really seem to be where agent tooling is heading

Tired of wrestling JIRA for AI project specs. If this actually streamlines things, I'm definitely giving it a look.

how are people currently evaluating between the different spec writing frameworks out there?

I've been using this, or more pointedly, I built an agent fleet (bespoke harness) where the planner agent uses OpenSpec to generate the plan. Then turns the tasks into a ticket graph.

It works fairly well, and it is definitely less heavy than SpecKit.

LOVE. LOVE. LOVE. Openspec.

Easily my favorite spec driven development framework.

It scored really well in our internal evals as well.

I think it has the most sane ceremony and its model fits my mental model really well.

I've also been working on a TUI that will automatically generate "phases" with each one being a openspec spec.

I would highly recommend trying out SpecDriven development. I found it to be the most productive way to work with LLMs for larger tasks, and I have found that it improves performance on larger tasks.

To me, this is where LLMs should go. Collaborating on shared documents that serve as a contract that then gets evaluated post-implementation

I've made multiple attempts to write domain-specific languages for LLMs to use to guide software architecture so that I can have higher-quality software architecture and also so that it can communicate ideas to me in a more terse way.

One thing that I think LLMs are lacking right now is information density. I'm a guitarist, and I like this game called Rocksmith, but I think that its user interface kind of sucks. It's fun to play along with the songs, and it's fun that it scores me on the songs and gamifies playing guitar. For dense notes, the user interface just isn't very good.

That kind of made me think more about information density. A sheet of notes is very dense, but it takes a little more time to process. Guitar tablature is slightly less dense, but I think it strikes a better balance between treble clef and Rocksmith. Really, I'd rather have all three of those presented to me.

This is really where I'd like to go with how I'm writing software now. LLMs: I'd love to be able to just create a specification that is very dense and describes domain-driven design concepts to the LLM, and then have a workflow that will do adversarial review to evaluate those concepts after implementing a phase.

This also kind of solves part of the problem with design decisions and artifact storage and all those things that we kind of see LLMs scatter around a codebase. If it exists in the spec, then it can be referenced later, and you can document changes, etc. Also, if you do the spec right, it could be language-agnostic.

It's just a bundle of skills and md files...

Why does it need to have an entire CLI?

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