constitution

A project-governance editor that creates or updates the constitution: the written principles and rules a project should follow.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define project principles, update governance rules, and identify follow-up specification work when other requests are included.
Why use it?
It keeps development guidelines in one place and prevents unrelated implementation requests from being carried out during that update.

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/constitution
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/github/spec-kit
Per session 13 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 2,085 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 $0.00013 $0.02085
Opus 5 $0.00006 $0.01043
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00417
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00209

Measured 2d ago against content hash b05aba827529, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

constitution 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 2d ago.

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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

2 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

templates/commands/constitution.md · 178 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 178 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

User Input

$ARGUMENTS

You MUST consider the user input before proceeding (if not empty).

Scope Guard

This command's own work is limited to updating the project constitution itself. Dependent templates and commands read the constitution at runtime and are not modified here.

  • Classify every part of the user input as either constitution content or a separate, non-governance intent.
  • If the input includes feature implementation, code generation, refactoring, building, or deployment requests, you MUST NOT execute them. Extract them as deferred intents instead.
  • You MUST NOT create, modify, or delete application source files, feature routes, components, tests, deployment files, or other artifacts unrelated to the constitution workflow.
  • If it is unclear whether an instruction is constitution content, ask for clarification before making changes.
  • After completing the constitution update, include a Next Actions section for each deferred intent. List the original intent and suggest the appropriate follow-up Spec Kit command, such as __SPECKIT_COMMAND_SPECIFY__, without invoking it.
  • If there are no non-governance intents, omit the Next Actions section.

Pre-Execution Checks

Check for extension hooks (before constitution update):

  • Check if .specify/extensions.yml exists in the project root.
  • If it exists, read it and look for entries under the hooks.before_constitution key
  • If the YAML cannot be parsed or is invalid, skip hook checking silently and continue normally
  • Filter out hooks where enabled is explicitly false. Treat hooks without an enabled field as enabled by default.
  • For each remaining hook, do not attempt to interpret or evaluate hook condition expressions:
    • If the hook has no condition field, or it is null/empty, treat the hook as executable
    • If the hook defines a non-empty condition, skip the hook and leave condition evaluation to the HookExecutor implementation
  • For each executable hook, output the following based on its optional flag:
    • Optional hook (optional: true):
      ## Extension Hooks
      
      **Optional Pre-Hook**: {extension}
      Command: `/{command}`
      Description: {description}
      
      Prompt: {prompt}
      To execute: `/{command}`
      
    • Mandatory hook (optional: false):
      ## Extension Hooks
      
      **Automatic Pre-Hook**: {extension}
      Executing: `/{command}`
      EXECUTE_COMMAND: {command}
      
      Wait for the result of the hook command before proceeding to the Outline.
      
      After emitting the block above you MUST actually invoke the hook and wait for it to finish before continuing. Run it the same way you would run the command yourself in this agent/session (the invocation may differ from the literal {command} id shown above, e.g. a skills-mode agent runs it as /skill:speckit-... or $speckit-...). Emitting the block alone does not run the hook.
  • If no hooks are registered or .specify/extensions.yml does not exist, skip silently

Read the full file on GitHub · 178 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 178 lines · 13 tokens per session scan A b05aba827529

Subscribe to this mod's changes

constitution is a command published in the GitHub repository github/spec-kit (132,298 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 13 tokens to every session and 2,085 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. 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.

Related

Other commands, from other repositories