speckit.specify

A command for creating a software feature specification, with independent work delegated to parallel sub-agents. A feature specification describes user needs and requirements before implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define a new feature, document user stories and success criteria, and produce a requirements checklist for review.
Why use it?
It helps turn an idea into a focused, testable document and adds a separate quality review to find missing scenarios, edge cases, or unclear requirements.

Command

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/github/spec-kit-copilot/speckit.specify
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/github/spec-kit-copilot
Per session 0 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 237 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00000 $0.00237
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.00118
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.00047
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00024

Measured yesterday against content hash a5c8ec6da25f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

speckit.specify scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

spec-kit-presets/copilot-sub-agents/commands/speckit.specify.md · 17 lines

What it actually says

Sub-Agent Delegation

When executing this command, delegate independent work to parallel sub-agents to reduce total execution time.

How to dispatch sub-agents in Copilot:

  • VS Code: Use the runSubagent tool to spawn each sub-agent in an isolated context.
  • CLI: Delegate to a sub-agent process — Copilot CLI automatically manages subsidiary sub-agent execution. You can also target custom agents defined in .github/agents/ or ~/.copilot/agents/.

Spec Quality Validation

After writing the specification to SPEC_FILE (step 6), dispatch the quality validation as a sub-agent while the main agent prepares the completion report:

  • Sub-agent: Quality Validation — "Validate the specification at {SPEC_FILE} against these quality criteria: no implementation details, focused on user value, testable requirements, measurable success criteria, all scenarios defined, edge cases identified, scope bounded. Generate a checklist at {FEATURE_DIR}/checklists/requirements.md. Return: pass/fail status for each item and specific issues found."

If the sub-agent reports failures, address them in the main agent before finalizing.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 17 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A a5c8ec6da25f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

speckit.specify is a command published in the GitHub repository github/spec-kit-copilot (11 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 237 tokens. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.