spec-driven-development

spec-driven-development is a skill for Claude Code from shennawardana23/skillme. It costs 72 tokens per session (1,646 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A guide for writing a clear, reviewable specification before implementing a software project or feature. The specification records what will be built, why it is needed, and how completion will be judged.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting a project or larger feature, clarifying incomplete requirements, planning multi-file changes, or making an architectural decision.
Why use it?
It reduces guesswork when requirements are vague and gives the human and agent a shared reference for implementation decisions.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the skillme plugin — 137 skills, 2 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it when starting a project or larger feature, clarifying incomplete requirements, planning multi-file changes, or making an architectural decision.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/shennawardana23/skillme/spec-driven-development
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.

Any agent
npx skills add shennawardana23/skillme --skill spec-driven-development
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/shennawardana23/skillme

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install skillme, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 137 skills, 2 commands.

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 spec-driven-development

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/spec-driven-development.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/spec-driven-development)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/spec-driven-development"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/shennawardana23/skillme/spec-driven-development.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 72 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,646 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00072 $0.01646
Opus 5 $0.00036 $0.00823
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00329
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00165

Measured 4d ago against content hash 6ec7f34efb02, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

spec-driven-development 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/spec-driven-development/SKILL.md · 179 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 179 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Spec-Driven Development

Write the spec before the code. The spec is the shared source of truth between agent and human — what's being built, why, and how "done" will be recognized — and every downstream implementation decision derives from it, not from re-interpreting the original request each time. Code without a spec is guessing dressed up as progress.

When to use

Starting a new project or feature; requirements are ambiguous or incomplete; the change touches multiple files or modules; about to make an architectural decision; the task would take more than ~30 minutes to implement.

Skip it for: single-line fixes, typo corrections, or a change where requirements are unambiguous and fully self-contained.

The gated workflow

Four phases. Don't advance until the current one is validated by a human.

SPECIFY ──→ PLAN ──→ TASKS ──→ IMPLEMENT
   │          │        │          │
   ▼          ▼        ▼          ▼
 human      human    human      human
 reviews    reviews  reviews    reviews

1. Specify

Ask clarifying questions until requirements are concrete, and surface assumptions before writing anything else:

ASSUMPTIONS:
1. Web application, not native mobile
2. Session-based auth (not JWT)
3. PostgreSQL (matches the existing schema)
→ Correct these now, or I'll proceed with them.

Don't silently fill in ambiguous requirements — the spec's whole purpose is surfacing misunderstanding before code exists, and a silent assumption is the most dangerous kind of misunderstanding because nobody gets a chance to catch it.

Cover six areas:

  1. Objective — what's being built, for whom, what success looks like.
  2. Commands — full executable commands, not just tool names (npm run build, not "build it").
  3. Project structure — where source, tests, and docs live.
  4. Code style — one real snippet in the target style beats three paragraphs describing it.
  5. Testing strategy — framework, test locations, which levels cover which concerns.
  6. Boundaries — three tiers: Always (run tests before commit, validate inputs), Ask first (schema changes, new dependencies, CI config), Never (commit secrets, edit vendor directories, delete failing tests without approval).

Read the full file on GitHub · 179 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 · 179 lines · 72 tokens per session scan A 6ec7f34efb02

Subscribe to this mod's changes

spec-driven-development is a skill published in the GitHub repository shennawardana23/skillme (2 stars, last pushed 10d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 72 tokens to every session and 1,646 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 2026-09-03.

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