Overview

The Spec-Driven Workflow

Every stage of the lifecycle is driven by one canonical Skill — a slash command your coding agent runs, which in turn calls misterspec's own deterministic internal commands for every mechanical step. Here is the whole pipeline, in real order, with the actual invocation for each stage.

1. Knowledge & Constitution

/mister-knowledge-base then /mister-constitution

Turns raw source material into structured Knowledge entries, then distills the project's own non-negotiable rules into a Constitution — the Tier-0 content every later Context Pack always includes.

2. Program

/mister-program

Establishes one initiative grouping related Features, via internal create program — the top of the artifact hierarchy.

3. Feature

/mister-features PRG-###

Decomposes a Program into one or more Features — one coherent slice of the initiative each.

4. Specs

/mister-specify FEAT-###

Writes one or more Specs for a Feature — testable, unambiguous requirements, never implementation detail.

5. Plan

/mister-plan SPEC-###

Designs a concrete technical strategy mapping every requirement to how it will be built. Since 018, requests a planning-intent Context Pack first via internal context.

6. Tasks

/mister-tasks SPEC-###

Decomposes the Plan into ordered, independently verifiable Tasks that /mister-implement will pick up one at a time.

7. Implementation

/mister-implement SPEC-###

Selects the next executable Task, implements it against the real codebase, verifies it by its own stated method, and marks it complete only once that evidence exists. Since 034, selection and readiness (blocked Tasks are never picked up) come from one internal prepare call instead of several separate ones.

8. Validation

/mister-analyze SPEC-###

Compares required behavior against the actual implementation, requirement by requirement, and records a specific, evidence-backed verdict — never a generic pass/fail.

9. Wrap-up (optional)

/mister-wrap-up SPEC-###

Synthesizes the Spec's own artifacts, real commit history, Knowledge base, Constitution, and related Learnings into one downstream cortex/SPEC-###-<slug>.md documentation page — raw material for a future official docs site or GitBook, never a canonical project artifact itself. Runnable any time after the Spec has a Plan, independent of whether Validation has run.

What happens underneath

Every one of those nine Skills is a thin layer of judgment on top of misterspec's own deterministic commands. For example, /mister-plan's own real procedure is:

misterspec internal resolve SPEC-014
misterspec internal inspect SPEC-014
misterspec internal context SPEC-014 --intent planning   # since 018
# (agent designs the strategy here — this step is not mechanical)
misterspec internal create-artifact plan --for SPEC-014
misterspec internal validate SPEC-014

The agent never invents an ID, guesses a canonical path, or hand-writes a fingerprint — every one of those is a call into misterspec. See the full Command Reference for every one of these, and The Context Engine for what internal context actually returns and why.