spec-driven-development

spec-driven-development is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from addyosmani/agent-skills. It costs 67 tokens per session (2,586 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A development process that writes a structured specification before code. The specification records what to build, why it matters, and how to decide whether it is finished.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define new projects, features, or major changes, then turn the agreed plan into implementation tasks.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork when requirements are vague, large, or spread across several parts of a project.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the agent-skills plugin — 25 skills, 10 commands, 4 agents, 1 hook shipped together

About the project

addyosmani/agent-skills is a collection of reusable workflows, quality checks, commands, and other instructions that guide AI coding agents through software development. It is for developers who want agents to follow consistent engineering practices, and the catalogue entries are its packaged skills, commands, agents, plugins, instructions, and hooks.

addyosmani/agent-skills · 92,284 stars · on GitHub

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 skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/spec-driven-development
Any agent
npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skills --skill spec-driven-development
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 25 skills, 10 commands, 4 agents, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for spec-driven-development

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/spec-driven-development.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/spec-driven-development)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/spec-driven-development"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/addyosmani/agent-skills/spec-driven-development.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,586 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 $0.00067 $0.02586
Opus 5 $0.00034 $0.01293
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00517
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00259

Measured 5d ago against content hash 615ff006266a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

spec-driven-development 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 5d 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

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

skills/spec-driven-development/SKILL.md · 246 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 246 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Spec-Driven Development

Overview

Write a structured specification before writing any code. The spec is the shared source of truth between you and the human engineer — it defines what we're building, why, and how we'll know it's done. Code without a spec is guessing.

When to Use

  • Starting a new project or feature
  • Requirements are ambiguous or incomplete
  • The change touches multiple files or modules
  • You're about to make an architectural decision
  • The task would take more than 30 minutes to implement

When NOT to use: Single-line fixes, typo corrections, or changes where requirements are unambiguous and self-contained.

The Gated Workflow

Spec-driven development has four phases, preceded by a scope check (Phase 0) that activates only when one request bundles several independently testable capabilities. Do not advance to the next phase until the current one is validated.

SPECIFY ──→ PLAN ──→ TASKS ──→ IMPLEMENT
   │          │        │          │
   ▼          ▼        ▼          ▼
 Human      Human    Human      Human
 reviews    reviews  reviews    reviews

Phase 0: Scope Check

Most requests describe one capability. If this one does, skip this phase and go straight to Specify — Phase 0 exists for the exception, not the rule, and it puts no hierarchy on single-capability features.

Detection. Decompose before specifying when a single requirement bundles several independently testable capabilities:

  • The requirement names distinct capabilities with their own consumers or data (e.g. identity, billing, notifications, reporting)
  • Acceptance criteria cluster into groups that could ship and be verified separately
  • One capability could be cut or replaced without rewriting the others' requirements

Propose a capability map before writing any spec. Small and reviewable — a module table plus a build order, not a project plan:

# Capability Map: [Initiative Name]

| Module id | Responsibility | Depends on |
|---|---|---|
| identity | Accounts, sessions, SSO | — |
| billing | Plans, invoices, payments | identity |
| notifications | Email and webhook fan-out | identity |
| reporting | Usage dashboards | billing, notifications |

Build order: identity → billing, notifications → reporting

Read the full file on GitHub · 246 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. 5d ago First seen · 246 lines · 67 tokens per session scan A 615ff006266a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

spec-driven-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository addyosmani/agent-skills (92,284 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 2,586 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 skills, from other repositories

test-driven-development

Drives development with tests via Red-Green-Refactor and the Prove-It pattern, with hard rules against weakening assertions or faking green suites. Use when implementing any logic, fixing any bug, or changing any behavior. Triggers on "add a feature", "fix this bug", "write tests", or any task where done must be…

borhen68/SkillEngine · 79 tokens

ai-output-validation

Validates, parses, and sanitizes AI-generated outputs before they reach end users or downstream systems. Structured output enforcement, schema validation, and fallback handling.

DevelopersGlobal/ai-agent-skills · 35 tokens

ai-ops

Guides operational excellence for AI/ML systems in production. Use when deploying models, managing inference infrastructure, monitoring model drift, or maintaining AI-powered features. Use when you need reliable, observable, and governable machine learning systems.

borhen68/SkillEngine · 50 tokens

chaos-engineering

Guides systematic fault injection and resilience testing. Use when designing for high availability, verifying disaster recovery, testing failure modes, or building fault-tolerant systems. Use when you need to prove your system survives infrastructure failures, network partitions, dependency outages, or cascading…

borhen68/SkillEngine · 59 tokens

ci-cd-and-automation

Automates CI/CD pipeline setup. Use when setting up or modifying build and deployment pipelines. Use when you need to automate quality gates, configure test runners in CI, or establish deployment strategies.

borhen68/SkillEngine · 45 tokens

context-engineering

Optimizes agent context setup. Use when starting a new session, when agent output quality degrades, when switching between tasks, or when you need to configure rules files and context for a project.

borhen68/SkillEngine · 43 tokens