specify

An interactive workflow for turning an idea into a clear software specification. It records expected behavior, unresolved questions, capability maps, and decision records for later planning.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to clarify a feature, document its behavior, identify capabilities, and record important design decisions. It produces specification files and machine-readable planning data.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork before implementation by making the intended behavior explicit. It also gives a planning step structured information to break into tasks.

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/dowwie/tasker/specify
Any agent
npx skills add Dowwie/tasker --skill specify
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Dowwie/tasker

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 32 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 18,418 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 $0.00032 $0.18418
Opus 5 $0.00016 $0.09209
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.03684
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.01842

Measured 2d ago against content hash f7d935f38297, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 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.

skills/specify/SKILL.md · 2,408 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 2,408 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Specify Workflow

IMPORTANT: All tasker working files go in $TARGET_DIR/.tasker/. Do NOT create any other directories like project-planning/, planning/, or schemas/ at the target project root. The .tasker/ directory is the ONLY location for tasker artifacts (including .tasker/schemas/ for JSON schemas).

An agent-driven interactive workflow that transforms ideas into actionable specifications with extracted capabilities, ready for /plan to decompose into tasks.

Core Principles

  1. Workflows and invariants before architecture - Never discuss implementation until behavior is clear
  2. Decision-dense, not prose-dense - Bullet points over paragraphs
  3. No guessing — Uncertainty becomes Open Questions
  4. Minimal facilitation — Decide only when required
  5. Specs are living; ADRs are historical
  6. Less is more — Avoid ceremony

Artifacts

Required Outputs (in TARGET project)

  • README{TARGET}/README.md (project overview - what it is, how to use it)
  • Spec Packet{TARGET}/docs/specs/<slug>.md (human-readable)
  • Capability Map{TARGET}/docs/specs/<slug>.capabilities.json (machine-readable, for /plan)
  • Behavior Model (FSM){TARGET}/docs/state-machines/<slug>/ (state machine artifacts, for /plan and /execute)
  • ADR files{TARGET}/docs/adrs/ADR-####-<slug>.md (0..N)

Working Files (in target project's .tasker/)

  • Session state$TARGET_DIR/.tasker/state.json (persistent, primary resume source)
  • Spec draft$TARGET_DIR/.tasker/spec-draft.md (working draft, written incrementally)
  • Discovery file$TARGET_DIR/.tasker/clarify-session.md (append-only log)
  • Stock-takes$TARGET_DIR/.tasker/stock-takes.md (append-only log of vision evolution)
  • Decision registry$TARGET_DIR/.tasker/decisions.json (index of decisions/ADRs)
  • Spec Review$TARGET_DIR/.tasker/spec-review.json (weakness analysis)

Archive

After completion, artifacts can be archived using tasker archive for post-hoc analysis.

Read the full file on GitHub · 2,408 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 · 2,408 lines · 32 tokens per session scan A f7d935f38297

Subscribe to this mod's changes

specify is a skill published in the GitHub repository Dowwie/tasker (19 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 32 tokens to every session and 18,418 once invoked, about $0.0002 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.