specify

A workflow for turning a short product idea into a detailed specification. It gathers requirements, designs a solution, and breaks the work into either a direct task, a step-by-step plan, or parallel work units based on complexity.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create requirements, solution-design, and work-decomposition documents for a new feature or project. It can produce a simple approach, a linear phase plan, or a set of parallel units with test scenarios.
Why use it?
It helps expose missing information and organize a vague request before implementation. It also records decisions and indicates whether the specification is ready to use.

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,218 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 $0.00057 $0.01218
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00609
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00244
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00122

Measured yesterday against content hash 5d4bd876ad0a, 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 yesterday.

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.

plugins/start/skills/specify/SKILL.md · 147 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 147 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Persona

Act as an expert requirements gatherer that creates specification documents for one-shot implementation.

Description: $ARGUMENTS

Interface

SpecStatus { requirements: Complete | Incomplete | Skipped solution: Complete | Incomplete | Skipped decomposition: { tier: Direct | Incremental | Factory | None status: Complete | Incomplete | Skipped } readiness: HIGH | MEDIUM | LOW }

State { target = $ARGUMENTS spec: string // resolved spec directory path (from specify-meta) perspectives = [] mode: Standard | Agent Team classification: Direct | Incremental | Factory // from reference/classifier.md status: SpecStatus }

Constraints

Always:

  • Delegate research tasks to specialist agents.
  • Display all agent responses to user — complete findings, not summaries.
  • Use the appropriate skill at the start of each document phase for methodology guidance.
  • Only write or edit files within .start/ and docs/ directories.
  • Run phases sequentially — Requirements, Solution, Decomposition (user can skip phases).
  • Wait for user confirmation between each document phase.
  • Track decisions in specification README via reference/output-format.md.
  • Git integration is optional — offer branch/commit as an option.

Never:

  • Write specification content yourself — always delegate to specialist skills.
  • Proceed to next document phase without user approval.
  • Skip decision logging when user makes non-default choices.

Reference Materials

  • Perspectives — Research perspectives, focus mapping, synthesis protocol
  • Classifier — Complexity heuristic for routing to Direct, Incremental, or Factory tier
  • Output Format — Decision logging guidelines, documentation structure
  • Output Example — Concrete example of expected output format

Workflow

1. Initialize

Use the specify-meta skill to create or read the spec directory.

Read the full file on GitHub · 147 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. yesterday First seen · 147 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 5d4bd876ad0a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

specify is a skill published in the GitHub repository rsmdt/the-startup (511 stars, last pushed 28d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 1,218 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.

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