tiny-spec

A tiny, opinionated take on spec-driven development.

uvx tiny-spec install

tiny-spec is a four-step workflow for Claude Code that turns a ticket into shipped, reviewed code. You write the intent, it produces a design, a task list, and then builds the work one task at a time. Every task is implemented by one agent and graded by an independent reviewer that runs the real tests before anything is committed.

That core is three skills and two agents. In front of it sit two front doors — pick the one that matches where you're starting. Over the top sits one router, tiny-spec-run, which drives the chain and, when you ask it to, works a whole list of stories through to merged code. No config file, no build step.

   GREENFIELD                        BROWNFIELD
   starting from an idea             starting from a codebase
   tiny-spec-scope                   tiny-spec-adopt
   idea → Features → Stories         real code → constitution
   BREAKDOWN.md                      constitution.md
            \                         /
             └───────────┬───────────┘
                         ▼
   tiny-spec-create  →  tiny-spec-plan  →  tiny-spec-build
   intent               design + tasks      per-task loop
   SPEC.md              PLAN.md             plan → implement
                        tasks.md            → review → commit

   tiny-spec-run      one router. Walks the chain and stops before build —
                      or, asked to, builds each story and merges it.
   tiny-spec-design   optional. Wireframes → tokens + gradeable screens.

Pick one front door, once per project. Starting from an idea with no code yet? Run tiny-spec-scope — it interviews the idea into a BREAKDOWN.md, a flat list of Features → Stories with draft acceptance criteria. Working in a codebase that already exists? Run tiny-spec-adopt — it reads your repo and derives the constitution from what's actually there: your real lint and test commands, your real layout, your real conventions. Have a single known ticket in a project that's already set up? Skip both and start at tiny-spec-create.

Neither builds anything. They set the project up so the three core skills have something true to work from, and both write a regenerable file you can edit freely.

How small

Every other kit in this space is bigger. That is the whole pitch, so here is the receipt rather than the adjective:

The whole of tiny-spec is 2,195 lines of markdown across 7 skills and 2 agents. No config file, no build step, no orchestrator, no CLI to initialize a project — the skills are the product.

_{Counted on 2026-08-03 from each project's own repository, not its marketing copy — Spec Kit's templates/commands/, OpenSpec's skills/, BMAD's SKILL.md and customize.toml files on main. All three are far more popular than tiny-spec, and being smaller is a bet, not a proof of quality — re-run the counts yourself before believing them.}

Why it's small

Most spec frameworks are generous by default: many phases, many agents, many generated documents. tiny-spec makes the opposite bet — keep one safeguard, drop the rest. That safeguard is the independent reviewer, which exercises acceptance criteria end to end, because a green unit test suite is not the same as working software.

The case for staying small:

• Documents are context, and context isn't free. Every paragraph the agent has to hold is room it no longer has for your actual code. tiny-spec keeps the spine small — a constitution and a short memory — and injects only what each task needs.
• Real work is a ticket inside a system, not a greenfield repo. tiny-spec binds to a ticket and references your task platform instead of re-describing the world.
• Rigid pipelines fight the user. Mandatory phases impose ceremony on work that doesn't need it. The extra structure here is optional — add shape where it pays.
• More moving parts is more to maintain. Orchestrators, ownership contracts, and config files are themselves a system you have to keep in sync. Two agents are not.
• Generated docs can fake rigor. A folder of polished planning artifacts looks like progress, but the proof is the reviewer running your real tests before each commit.

That's the whole trade: where larger kits add machinery, tiny-spec adds one independent reviewer and stops.

Does the trade hold up?

Smaller is easy to claim, so the suite ships a harness that measures it. docs/eval/ runs tiny-spec headlessly on benchmark tasks in hermetic sandboxes, grades the produced code with held-out tests the suite never sees, and checks the reviewer's own verdict against that ground truth. The number that matters is false-PASS rate — how often the gate blesses code that is actually broken.

Most recent run — 5 benchmark tasks on v1.0.0:

Two earlier versions scored identically, which is the more interesting result: the loop is stable across releases rather than tuned to one commit — including through 1.0, which rebuilt the planning chain underneath it.

See docs/eval/README.md for the method and docs/sdd-evaluation-rubric.md for the rubric. Read both skeptically: it is my benchmark, of my own tool, scored by me, on small self-contained tasks — so it measures the loop on well-specified work, not large-codebase performance. The harness is in the repo so you don't have to take my word for it.

New to spec-driven development?

Spec-driven development (SDD) means writing down what you want and why before any code exists, then letting that spec drive the build. Instead of prompting an agent and hoping, you hand it a small, explicit contract — the intent, a design, and an ordered list of tasks. The payoff: the agent stops guessing, you review the plan before a line is written, and the result is checked against the spec rather than vibes.

Quickstart

Install the skills and agents into your Claude Code config with uv:

uvx tiny-spec install

Restart Claude Code so it picks up the new skills, then run the flow in your project:

/tiny-spec-scope     # starting from an idea: interview it into stories (BREAKDOWN.md)
/tiny-spec-adopt     # starting from a codebase: derive the constitution from real code
/tiny-spec-create    # capture intent and requirements (binds a ticket, optional)
/tiny-spec-plan      # design it, harden the constitution, slice the task list
/tiny-spec-build     # build each task: implement, review, commit

Run one of the two front doors once per project, then create → plan → build per ticket. Or let the router drive:

/tiny-spec-run       # walks the chain, reconciling anything stale; stops before build
/tiny-spec-build     # build each task: implement, review, commit

tiny-spec-run resolves where your work stands and invokes whichever skill moves it forward. It writes nothing itself, it only delegates. By default it stops before tiny-spec-build — that's where you actually review the work.

Ask it to build and it goes all the way instead:

/tiny-spec-run build the backlog     # per story: branch → plan → build → merge → next

It reads your BREAKDOWN.md (or a list you paste) and works the stories one after another, merging each finished branch into main locally before starting the next — until it's done or reaches a terminal state it names out loud. See Working a whole list. Which of the two it does is decided from your opening request and never changes mid-run — a run you started as "get it ready" will not talk itself into building.

Building from a mockup? Run /tiny-spec-design after create. Commit your exports to design/ first; it reads what's there and asks which screens this ticket covers. Designs, if you have them walks through it.

Re-run install any time to update; tiny-spec uninstall removes only what it installed. Each skill is copied (not symlinked) so every install is self-contained.

git clone https://github.com/GrayMa77er/tiny-spec.git
cd tiny-spec

mkdir -p "$HOME/.claude/skills" "$HOME/.claude/agents"
for s in tiny-spec-scope tiny-spec-adopt tiny-spec-run tiny-spec-create tiny-spec-design tiny-spec-plan tiny-spec-build; do
  cp -R "$s" "$HOME/.claude/skills/$s"
done
cp agents/*.md "$HOME/.claude/agents/"

See a finished run first

examples/todo-cli/ is a real run of the flow on one small ticket, committed verbatim — the TICKET.md that went in, the SPEC.md, PLAN.md, tasks.md and constitution.md the suite wrote, and the code and tests it produced. The tests pass; you can clone it and run the gate yourself.

How it works

The constitution (constitution.md) is the spine. tiny-spec-adopt derives it from your codebase, or tiny-spec-create seeds it from a short interview; tiny-spec-plan hardens it with concrete engineering rules, and tiny-spec-build injects it whole into every task. It holds your style, standards, invariants, definition of done, and verification commands.

On an existing codebase, deriving beats asking. Your test command, layout, and conventions are already written down — in package.json, in CI, in your linter config, in the shape of the tree. tiny-spec-adopt reads them, marks each section as declared or inferred so you know which parts to distrust, then runs the verification commands it derived and reports which went green. A gate that has never been run turns every future review into theatre.

Because it is project-wide the constitution can also go missing — deleted, or never committed — while your specs survive. Re-running tiny-spec-adopt (or tiny-spec-create, on a project with no code yet) repairs it, and marks completed tasks stale, since they were reviewed against a document that wasn't there.

Designs, if you have them

Wireframes usually get read once and forgotten. tiny-spec turns them into two durable things — a project-wide token system in the constitution, and a per-screen entry in the spec — so "does this look right?" becomes something the reviewer can fail a task on. Skip all of it for a CLI or a library; the constitution simply has no design section.

Designs enter by convention, not by argument. No skill takes a design flag or a path parameter. tiny-spec-design reads every file in design/ at your project root and asks which screens this ticket covers; you can also just hand it paths. Change an export later and tiny-spec-run notices — it re-hashes every anchored export on its way down the chain, and routes a mismatch back to tiny-spec-design, marking the spec stale exactly like editing a requirement.

1. Commit your exports. Any format an agent can read — a Figma export, an HTML mockup, an Excalidraw file, a photo of a whiteboard.

your-project/
  design/
    signup.png
    dashboard.png

2. tiny-spec-design looks at them and proposes a design system. Actually looks — they are read as images. It infers one coherent scale across all of them rather than measuring each screen separately, tells you what it rounded ("your wireframes had 19px and 21px — proposing space.5=20px for both"), and on your approval writes it into .spec/constitution.md:

## Design system
- color:  `color.surface.base` #FFFFFF · `color.text.default` #111111
          `color.text.muted` #6B7280 · `color.text.danger` #B91C1C
- space:  `space.1`=4px · `space.2`=8px · `space.4`=16px · `space.6`=24px
- type:   `type.heading.lg` 24px/600/1.25 · `type.body` 16px/400/1.5
          `type.caption` 13px/400/1.4
- states: every interactive surface defines default, focus, disabled, loading, empty, error

Since it is project-wide, every screen from here on speaks this vocabulary — and a redesign edits this one table instead of every file.

3. Each screen becomes a D<n> in SPEC.md, written in those token names:

## Design

- D1 — Signup form
  - source: figma.com/file/abc#node-12:34 (view-only)
  - export: design/signup.png
  - sha256: d21d6330648c504edeb924b5398bf7fb6485d3a4c1907e43d800970f39622a1d
  - layout: single centered column, max 420px; title → field → error → submit
  - elements:
    - card    `[data-testid="signup-card"]`   → space.6 padding, color.surface.base
    - title   `[data-testid="signup-title"]`  → type.heading.lg, space.4 below
    - field   `[data-testid="signup-email"]`  → type.body, space.2 below
    - error   `[data-testid="signup-error"]`  → type.caption, color.text.danger
  - states: error (caption under the field), loading (spinner replaces button label)

The selectors are a contract, not a hint — the reviewer measures exactly these, so your markup carries them verbatim. Prefer test ids over CSS classes: classes get renamed by refactors and mangled by CSS-in-JS, and a selector that silently stops matching is the failure this exists to prevent.

4. Tag the tasks that build the surface — and only those, not the API call behind it. This is your blast radius:

- [ ] T4 — Build the signup form
  - acceptance: submitting a valid email advances to the verify step
  - design: D1

5. The reviewer measures it, then looks at it, and fails on both:

DESIGN: D1 — Signup form
  [data-testid="signup-card"]  padding 19px — not on the space.* scale (4/8/16/24)
  [data-testid="signup-email"] MISSING FROM DOM — never built, or renamed
  [data-testid="signup-error"] rgb(204,0,0) — color.text.danger is #B91C1C
  state "loading" never renders: button label stays "Continue", no spinner
  judge: read states default, error — compared against design/signup.png
    state "error": signup-error sits behind the card — every token right, and the
      user sees nothing where the export shows the red caption
    state "default": submit label "Create account" truncates to "Create acco…"
FINDINGS:
- flag: title/field gap feels tight (on-scale — does not fail the task)

Numbers first, and never a screenshot diff — pixel comparison goes flaky on font antialiasing and teams end up muting it. But no measurement catches an element that is present, on-token, and still not on screen: occluded, clipped, truncated, or the same color as what's behind it. So the last step reads a screenshot of each state next to your export and grades presence, legibility, and correspondence. Where a number already settled the question the eye may only flag, which keeps the two halves from contradicting each other — measurable or visible violations fail, taste comes back as flag: notes. A task with no design: tag is graded exactly as before.

## Verification commands
- test:   `npm test`
- visual: `node visual.mjs`

// visual.mjs — node visual.mjs '<selector>' ['<selector>'...]
import { chromium } from 'playwright';

const b = await chromium.launch({ channel: 'chrome' });   // your Chrome, no download
const p = await b.newPage({ viewport: { width: 900, height: 700 } });
await p.goto('http://localhost:3000/signup');             // your dev server + route

for (const sel of process.argv.slice(2)) {
  const el = await p.$(sel);
  if (!el) { console.log(`${sel}\n  MISSING FROM DOM`); continue; }   // required
  console.log(sel, JSON.stringify(await el.evaluate(n => {
    const c = getComputedStyle(n), r = n.getBoundingClientRect();
    return { padding: c.padding, margin: c.margin, fontSize: c.fontSize,
             fontWeight: c.fontWeight, lineHeight: c.lineHeight, color: c.color,
             background: c.backgroundColor, border: c.border,
             opacity: c.opacity, visibility: c.visibility,
             top: Math.round(r.top), w: Math.round(r.width), h: Math.round(r.height) };
  })));
}

const state = process.env.STATE ?? 'default';      // however you drive states
const shot = `/tmp/visual-${state}.png`;
await p.screenshot({ path: shot, fullPage: true });
console.log('SCREENSHOT', state, shot);            // this line arms the judge

await b.close();

No Figma token, plugin, or design SaaS. A view-only account works fine: the committed export is what the agents read, and source: keeps the trail back. Change an export and its recorded sha256 stops matching, which marks the spec stale exactly like editing a requirement — so a design that moved under finished work can't pass unnoticed.

tiny-spec-build walks the task list top to bottom. Each task runs through one loop:

1. Plan the task against the constitution (inline, brief).
2. Implement it with a fresh tiny-spec-build-executor agent.
3. Review it with an independent tiny-spec-build-reviewer agent that runs the gate and grades against the constitution and the task's acceptance.
4. On pass, commit the code plus a checklist tick. On fail, loop back to the executor with the findings. After two failed attempts the run halts exhausted.

Every task's acceptance is exercised end to end, black-box, by the reviewer — that part never varies. What does vary is how much of the toolchain gets re-proven around it: a clean install → build runs on the first task, the last one, anything touching dependency or build config, and anything carrying design:; in between the reviewer runs lint and tests against the existing build. It escalates back to the full gate whenever the narrower one can't carry the verdict, and the authoritative clean run happens once more over the whole project as the final smoke. Re-installing from scratch on every task proved the same thing repeatedly and was the slowest part of the loop.

flowchart TB
    SPEC[SPEC.md<br/>intent] --> PLAN[PLAN.md<br/>design] --> TASKS[tasks.md<br/>checklist]

    TASKS -->|pause: set| H[Halt — paused<br/>task stays unchecked]
    TASKS --> P[Plan task]
    P --> I[Implement<br/>executor]
    I --> R[Review + run gate<br/>full or scoped<br/>reviewer]
    I -->|blocker| B
    R -->|pass| C[Commit + tick]
    C --> TASKS
    R -->|fail| I
    R -->|fail twice| B[Halt — blocked / exhausted<br/>logged to decisions.md]

    CON([constitution.md]) -.-> P & I & R
    MEM([memory.md]) -.-> I & R
    DES([SPEC.md D-n + design/ export]) -.->|only on a design: task| I & R

Solid arrows are the flow. Dotted arrows show the persistent context injected into a step: the constitution.md goes into planning, implementation, and review, while memory.md is handed to the executor and reviewer. A task tagged design: also carries its screen's D<n> entry into both agents — and the review step then runs the visual: gate on top of the usual one.

A small memory.md carries operational lessons between runs, so the executor and reviewer (which start fresh each time) don't relearn the same pitfalls.

When a task can't pass because of a gap in the design or spec, the executor stops and logs a blocker instead of hacking around it. You fix the gap upstream in tiny-spec-plan or tiny-spec-create, then resume. Work runs one ticket at a time and resumes from the checklist state.

Working a whole list

Ask /tiny-spec-run to build — "build the backlog", "work through the breakdown", "spec it out and build it" — and it takes a list of stories and works them in batches. Per story it does the same four moves:

cut a branch from main  →  walk the chain  →  tiny-spec-build  →  merge back to main

Each branch is cut fresh from main, so a later story sees the earlier ones already merged — which is what makes an ordered list build correctly.

Independent stories build at the same time. A story can declare what it must follow with a needs: line in BREAKDOWN.md; everything with no unmet needs: forms a batch and builds concurrently, one git worktree per story, three at a time by default. The batch merges, then the next one starts.

## Feature: interface

- Story: expose both helpers on a CLI     slug: cli
  - AC: `textkit slugify "Hi There"` prints "hi-there"
  - needs: slugify, wordwrap

Omit needs: when a story stands alone — that's the common case, and the field is meant to be rare. A needs: you didn't need costs you parallelism forever; one you missed costs a single merge conflict, which the run already catches and halts on. You can also just name the set yourself at invocation ("build these three at once"), which overrides the graph. A cycle, or a needs: naming a story that isn't there, stops the run rather than being guessed past.

Tasks inside a story never run in parallel. They share files and each one assumes the last landed, so they stay strictly sequential. Parallelism is across stories only.

The list is BREAKDOWN.md by default — its - Story: entries, in file order, each already carrying a slug: (the branch and directory name) and AC: lines. Paste a list at invocation instead and that wins; but a bare feature name has no acceptance criteria, so tiny-spec-create will interview you when it reaches it. That's the honest trade: a breakdown runs unattended, a pasted list is supervised.

Every run ends in exactly one of six states, and it says which:

Only done means the work is built — and in a story run, that means all of them. Stopping at story 2 of 7 and reporting "done" is what autonomous loops get wrong most often, so the state is always named alongside what merged and what's still untouched.

A halt stops the lane it happened in, and ends the run after that batch. Its siblings were declared independent, so they finish and merge — killing working lanes because one failed throws away good work. But the run does not start the next batch: later stories usually assume the earlier ones landed, so skipping ahead past a failure just produces a second, more confusing failure downstream. With more than one lane you get each story's own state, and the run's state is the worst of them — four green lanes and one blocked is a blocked run.

Pause points are technical, not per-story. Any task can carry a pause: line, and the build halts before running it:

- [ ] T7 — run the schema migration against the restored snapshot
  - acceptance: every row in orders has a non-null tenant_id
  - pause: confirm the snapshot is current before this touches real rows

tiny-spec-plan proposes these for genuinely irreversible work — migrations, destructive file operations, a new dependency, an auth boundary, a public API contract. You can also give the run a standing policy up front ("halt before anything that touches auth") and it gets applied as each story's tasks are sliced.

What it will not do to your repo. It runs exactly seven git commands — switch, switch -c, merge --no-ff, merge --abort, worktree add, worktree list, and reads. It refuses to start on a dirty tree, or if a worktree path it needs already exists. It never pushes, never rebases, never resets, never deletes a branch, never removes a worktree, and never opens a PR. Merges are local, so a bad run is one git reset away; publishing stays yours. If the gate goes red after a merge it leaves the merge alone and tells you the undo command rather than running it — and it hands back the git worktree remove commands for the lanes instead of running those either, since a halted lane's worktree is the tree you need to look at.

Walk away and come back. Progress isn't written down, it's derived: a story whose ticked tasks.md is on main is done, a .spec/<slug>/ with an unchecked task is in progress, no directory means not started. Ask again tomorrow in a fresh session and it picks up where it stopped. No run-state file, no lock, no budget to configure — the story list is the budget.

It never fixes a blocker for you. A blocker means one of your documents is wrong, and a run allowed to rewrite the requirement its own task just failed would be grading its own homework. It reports and stops; the upstream edit is yours.

And it never decides to build on its own. Whether a run stops before the build or goes all the way is fixed from your opening request and never revised. Build is your review gate, so promoting itself into it is the one thing a router doesn't get to do.

Project layout

Each skill is one self-contained SKILL.md, with every document skeleton inline in it — no companion template files, no absolute paths, no shared parent required at runtime. A skill works wherever you drop it, and a run never stops to ask permission to read a template out of your Claude config directory.

tiny-spec creates a .spec/ directory in your project root, never inside a skill. It is namespaced per ticket, with a shared spine at the root:

.spec/
  constitution.md           project-wide, shared across tickets
  memory.md                 operational lessons, shared across tickets
  <ticket-id>/              one directory per ticket (PROJ-123/, gh-42/, …)
    SPEC.md  PLAN.md  tasks.md  decisions.md

BREAKDOWN.md and design/ sit at your project root rather than inside .spec/, because they are yours: the breakdown is a regenerable pre-spec planning file, and the design exports are project files no skill ever writes.

Every format lives inline in the skill that writes it — there is no separate contract document to keep in sync, and no skill reads anything but its own SKILL.md at runtime.

Integrations

tiny-spec binds to a task platform (Jira, GitHub Issues, Azure DevOps, Monday) by reference only: a ticket block in the spec and a Refs: footer on each Conventional Commit, so the platform auto-links the work. No API calls or credentials are required.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md, and read AGENTS.md before changing any skill or agent.

License

MIT