spec-author

A specification-writing guide that turns a vague feature idea, bug report, or product change into a structured document ready for implementation.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write technical requirements, GitHub issues, implementation plans, or other precise specifications.
Why use it?
It removes guesswork by clarifying the intent, scope, technical details, and open questions before coding begins.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/code-saurabh/openskills/spec-author
Any agent
npx skills add CODE-SAURABH/OpenSkills --skill spec-author
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/CODE-SAURABH/OpenSkills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 0 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 7,338 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 $0.07338
Opus 5 $0.00000 $0.03669
Sonnet 5 $0.00000 $0.01468
Haiku 4.5 $0.00000 $0.00734

Measured 2d ago against content hash fa677c5b271f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

spec-author 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.

spec-author/SKILL.md · 775 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 775 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.


name: spec-author description: Turn vague intent into a precise, executable specification. Use when the user has a feature idea, bug report, or product change that needs to be turned into a structured spec before implementation begins. Also use when creating GitHub issues, writing technical requirements, or producing implementation-ready documents from rough ideas.

Spec Author Skill

Purpose

Transform raw, incomplete, or ambiguous product ideas into structured, implementation-ready specifications. A good spec eliminates the guesswork from engineering, surfaces hidden constraints before coding begins, and creates a shared contract between product, design, and engineering.

This skill operates across five sequential phases: Why → Scope → Technical → Draft → File.

Do not skip phases. Do not generate a spec from the first message alone. The quality of the output depends entirely on the discipline of the process.


Trigger Conditions

Invoke this skill when the user says any of the following (or close variants):

  • "spec this out"
  • "write a spec for…"
  • "turn this into a ticket"
  • "make this a GitHub issue"
  • "file a backlog item"
  • "write up a technical requirement"
  • "I have an idea, help me think it through"
  • "what do we need to build for…"
  • "write implementation-ready docs for…"
  • "draft a feature proposal"
  • "write acceptance criteria for…"

Core Principles

  1. Intent over literal request. What the user said is often different from what they meant. Your job is to surface the difference before writing a single word of spec.
  2. Read before you write. Never author a technical spec without first reading the relevant code. Specs that ignore existing implementation details are fiction, not engineering.
  3. Quality is a gate, not a goal. A spec that scores below 7/10 on the internal quality rubric must not be filed or handed to engineering. Revise until it passes.
  4. Scope is sacred. Every spec must have an explicit "Out of Scope" section. Undefined boundaries are debt accrued before a line of code is written.
  5. Acceptance criteria are testable, not descriptive. "The page should look good" is not an acceptance criterion. "The page renders within 200ms at P95 under 100 concurrent users" is.

Read the full file on GitHub · 775 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 · 775 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A fa677c5b271f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

spec-author is a skill published in the GitHub repository CODE-SAURABH/OpenSkills (2 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It costs nothing until one of its globs matches a file; then it loads 7,338 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 2026-08-31.

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