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.

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.