Spec Kitty is an open-source command-line tool that turns product requirements into a repository-based workflow for AI-assisted software development. It stores specifications, plans, tasks, acceptance criteria, reviews, and merge decisions in Git while giving agents isolated git worktrees for parallel implementation. The catalogue add-ons support the project's workflows for coordinating agents and governing their work.
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.
npx skills add Priivacy-ai/spec-kitty --skill spec-kitty-charter-doctrinegit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Priivacy-ai/spec-kittyWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/priivacy-ai/spec-kitty/spec-kitty-charter-doctrine)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/priivacy-ai/spec-kitty/spec-kitty-charter-doctrine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/priivacy-ai/spec-kitty/spec-kitty-charter-doctrine/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/priivacy-ai/spec-kitty/spec-kitty-charter-doctrine"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/priivacy-ai/spec-kitty/spec-kitty-charter-doctrine.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00135 | $0.07684 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00054 | $0.03074 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00027 | $0.01537 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00014 | $0.00768 |
Grade A, and why
spec-kitty-charter-doctrine 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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 859 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
spec-kitty-charter-doctrine
Manage the charter lifecycle: interview, generate, context-load, sync,
and status. Access doctrine artifacts programmatically via DoctrineService.
Resolve agent profiles for role-scoped behavior. Load governance context
iteratively at action boundaries rather than dumping everything upfront.
.kittify/charter/charter.yaml is the Spec Kitty runtime governance
source for a project — the single git-tracked, structured file nesting
governance, directives, catalog, activation, and overrides.
.kittify/charter/charter.md is a curated, human-readable companion the
runtime never parses or resolves policy from. A repository may also keep
public governance docs outside .kittify/; those docs are human-facing
authority unless charter.yaml's governance.charter.offering.governance_references
points at them. The doctrine layer (src/charter/offering/) provides the
reusable knowledge artifacts (directives, tactics, paradigms, styleguides,
toolguides, procedures, agent profiles, step contracts) that the charter
references.
⛔ ARCHITECTURAL INVARIANT: spec-kitty NEVER calls LLMs
spec-kitty is a CLI tool invoked BY an LLM harness (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, etc.). The LLM harness IS the inference engine. spec-kitty must NEVER call any LLM API itself.
This is not a preference. It is a hard architectural rule with no exceptions.
Why this rule exists
| What you are reading this in | What that means |
|---|---|
| Claude Code | Claude IS already running. It should generate doctrine. |
| Codex CLI | Codex IS already running. It should generate doctrine. |
| Cursor / Gemini / Kiro / ... | Same — the harness IS the inference engine. |
If spec-kitty called the Anthropic SDK internally:
- It would need a separate
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY— a second API key alongside the one the harness already uses. - It would bypass the harness entirely, making the agent's reasoning invisible.
- It would make spec-kitty Anthropic-specific, breaking all other harnesses.
- It would be a hidden inference call the user never authorized or configured.
- It would duplicate what the harness can already do better, with full context.
What ships with it
2 files 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.
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.
- 1mo ago Changed c77ea77a282d
- 1mo ago First seen · 859 lines · 135 tokens per session scan A 860f5f71a502
spec-kitty-charter-doctrine is a skill published in the GitHub repository Priivacy-ai/spec-kitty (1,687 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 135 tokens to every session and 7,684 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
evidence-led-authoring
Shared bootstrap-owner contract for evidence-backed brownfield candidates, provenance, and imported baseline coverage.
implementation-standards
Reference material with coding standards (defensive coding, error handling, testing patterns). Loaded on demand by the Developer sub-agent (.github/agents/developer.md); not directly invokable.
spring-boot-4-conventions
Spring Framework 7 / Spring Boot 4 idioms and defaults. Use when writing or reviewing controllers, services, configuration, HTTP clients, async/virtual-thread code, or anything touching Spring's programming model.
clarity-over-cleverness
Apply clarity-over-cleverness rewrites — prefer code a junior engineer can read at a glance over compact-but-clever code. Use during /build's simplify step and during /code-simplify (alias "simplify the code"). Never weakens behavior; suite must remain green.
junit5-testcontainers-patterns
JUnit 5 + Spring Boot 4 test slice patterns and Testcontainers integration test patterns with @ServiceConnection. Use when writing or reviewing any test, especially when choosing between unit / slice / integration scope.
ears-spec-authoring
Author acceptance criteria using EARS-lite shapes with stable AC-NNN IDs and explicit Q-NNN open questions. Use when drafting or editing 01-spec.md, when transforming a tracker ticket into ACs, or when a user asks for a spec / requirements doc.