idea-to-spec

idea-to-spec is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit. It costs 84 tokens per session (2,875 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guided process that turns a rough product idea, feature request, or problem into a reviewed specification ready for implementation. It frames the work, researches open questions, challenges the idea, drafts and reviews the specification, then reaches a decision.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to shape an early idea into a durable, evidence-backed specification. It helps decide whether to revise, defer, reject, or approve the proposed work.
Why use it?
It exposes unsupported claims, unclear intent, missing constraints, and unresolved trade-offs before coding begins. The result gives later development work concrete acceptance criteria to prove.

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/gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit/idea-to-spec
Any agent
npx skills add gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit --skill idea-to-spec
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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 idea-to-spec

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit/idea-to-spec.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit/idea-to-spec)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit/idea-to-spec"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit/idea-to-spec.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 84 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,875 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 $0.00084 $0.02875
Opus 5 $0.00042 $0.01437
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00575
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00287

Measured 4d ago against content hash 8d6fd385f9a5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

idea-to-spec 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 4d 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/idea-to-spec/SKILL.md · 277 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 277 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Idea To Spec

Turn a rough idea into a reviewed, implementation-ready spec. The output is a durable spec whose acceptance criteria a delivery loop (such as spec-to-done) can later prove. Any capable agent — or a human facilitator — can run the loop from this file alone.

Inputs

  • Rough idea, problem, or opportunity.
  • Known constraints, non-goals, and audience.
  • Any provided context or research sources.
  • The reviewer or decision-maker for the final verdict.

The Loop

frame -> research -> grill -> draft -> review -> revise -> peer review (optional) -> verdict

This is a loop, not a pipeline. Route backward whenever a step finds a gap:

From When Return to
research the framed questions cannot be answered from reachable sources frame (narrow scope) or verdict (defer)
review / peer review a claim is unsupported or evidence is thin research
review / peer review intent is ambiguous or a trade-off is undecided grill
review / peer review the contract or criteria need rework revise, then review again
verdict outcome is revise / defer / reject the matching earlier step, or stop

Conformance Rules

  • The grill step is REQUIRED. It is the guard against accepting the input uncritically.
  • A spec produced without a grill pass is non-conformant, even if the draft looks complete.
  • A review that cannot find the grill record must return the work as non-conformant instead of accepting the spec.
  • If the loop runs unattended and grill answers are unavailable, the spec must include explicit flagged assumptions. Do not silently accept unanswered questions as facts.
  • Separate facts, assumptions, recommendations, and open questions.
  • Keep raw source dumps, private notes, and transcripts out of the spec. Link or summarize bounded evidence instead.
  • Do not invent evidence. If evidence is missing, mark the gap and route the work back to research, grill, or defer.
  • Peer review is optional; skipping it when no independent second reviewer is available is conformant. Recording a peer review that never ran is not.

Read the full file on GitHub · 277 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 4d ago First seen · 277 lines · 84 tokens per session scan A 8d6fd385f9a5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

idea-to-spec is a skill published in the GitHub repository gozhang2/loop-engineering-kit (5 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 84 tokens to every session and 2,875 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.

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