vaultspec-core 0.1.39

A governed development framework for AI-assisted engineering

vaultspec-core

The governed development harness for coding agents and the humans who review their work.

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Vaultspec guides agents through a Research → Decide (ADRs) → Plan → Execute → Verify pipeline, similar in spirit to spec-driven frameworks like Superpowers - with one difference: nothing is throwaway. All work leaves a papertrail in the project's .vault. Documents are bound together by feature tags and wiki-link references. Together, they represent the project's decision and execution history - a second brain your agents read before they write.

We hold ourselves to it, too: vaultspec-core is developed with vaultspec. Its own .vault currently holds 900+ CLI-scaffolded documents across 100+ features, and every terminal render on this page is real output - the stills against that live vault, the demo above against a scratch project:

What is included?

vaultspec-core implements the natural language description of the workflow, and the machinery that enforces it:

• Rules, skills, and agent personas for Claude, Codex, Gemini, and Antigravity, seeded from one .vaultspec source of truth and synced per provider.
• A CLI that scaffolds, audits, and repairs every vault document - templates, tag taxonomy, wiki-link resolution, and plan structure are enforced, never hand-written.
• Structured plans that scale with the work: four complexity tiers (L1-L4) with waves, phases, and steps under stable canonical identifiers.
• An MCP server for Model Context Protocol clients.

See the framework manual for the full tour.

[!TIP] The framework favours semantic search via the core's optional sister project, vaultspec-rag.

Getting started

1. Install

For the quickest, dependency-free project bootstrap, run from a git project folder:

uvx vaultspec-core install

Use it as a tool or dependency:

# You can add it as a local tool
uv tool install vaultspec-core

# Or a project dependency
uv add vaultspec-core

2. Bootstrap

If you added it as a project dependency, bootstrap from inside your environment:

uv run --no-sync vaultspec-core install

See the CLI reference for installation options.

[!NOTE] vaultspec-core install handles project integration separately: it manages a block in your .gitignore and .gitattributes, writes pre-commit hooks, and drops an .mcp.json for Model Context Protocol clients by default.

Install picks a mode for how the pre-commit hooks and the MCP server launch. Tool mode is the default and runs vaultspec-core through uvx, so it never enters your project's dependency set; dependency mode runs it through uv run and is selected automatically when your pyproject.toml lists vaultspec-core; dev mode is for placement in the default dev dependency group, rendering like dependency mode but not shipping in your built distributions. Pin any with install --mode tool, install --mode dependency, or install --mode dev. The choice is recorded per package in a committed workspace.json, so a workspace running vaultspec-core alongside a companion package can declare each in its own mode. An existing workspace has its mode inferred and recorded the next time you run install --upgrade.

3. Sync

All development paper trails live in .vault as markdown files. Rules, agents, and skills are seeded from .vaultspec via:

uv run --no-sync vaultspec-core sync

[!TIP] Make sure to run

uv run --no-sync vaultspec-core install --upgrade

after a library update as the shipped agents, skills and rules might change between library versions.

The pipeline at a glance

The pipeline breaks down into these steps: [R] Research → [D] Decide (ADRs) → [P] Plan → [E] Execute → [V] Verify. Research has a parallel entry point - Reference (/vaultspec-code-research) - that grounds the work in existing source code; a feature starts from either, or both. Each step ships with its skills, agents and CLI verbs.

To start using the framework describe the work you want done in natural language:

"Start a new vaultspec pipeline to research options for adding full-text search to the API."

The synced rules guide the agent through the pipeline stage by stage, writing documents into .vault/ as it goes: a research note, then a decision record, a plan, execution records, and a final review. You approve each checkpoint before the agent moves on.

Invoke a stage skill directly - for example /vaultspec-research - to enter the pipeline at a specific stage. See the framework manual for how each one works.

Skills

Skills are the slash-commands that drive each stage of the pipeline. Six map to the pipeline stages; two helpers - curate and documentation - cover everyday upkeep. The framework manual gives full guidance on each, plus two further skills for team coordination and project management.

Which skill, when

When you want to	Skill
Explore a problem and weigh options	/vaultspec-research
Ground the work in the existing codebase	/vaultspec-code-research
Record the decision and its consequences	/vaultspec-adr
Turn the decision into an implementation plan	/vaultspec-write
Work through the plan, step by step	/vaultspec-execute
Audit the finished work by severity	/vaultspec-code-review
Repair vault links, frontmatter, and naming	/vaultspec-curate
Draft user-facing documentation	/vaultspec-documentation

Every feature leaves a paper trail

One feature tag binds a feature's whole lifecycle - research, decision, plan, execution records, and audit - into a linked graph the CLI can trace, validate, and visualize:

Documents are scaffolded and structurally maintained through the vaultspec-core vault command group - frontmatter, filenames, and plan structure are never hand-written, while the body prose stays yours to edit. The CLI enforces templates, tag taxonomy, and wiki-link resolution so your vault stays consistent.

# Scaffold a document from a template
vaultspec-core vault add research --feature search-api

# Find and inspect documents
vaultspec-core vault list --feature search-api

# Validate frontmatter, links, and cross-references (--fix to auto-repair)
vaultspec-core vault check all --fix

# Visualize a feature's dependency graph
vaultspec-core vault graph --feature search-api

Plans carry deeper structure - waves, phases, and steps. The framework manual covers that structure.

The vault, rendered in Obsidian

The vault is plain Markdown with wiki-links, so it opens directly in Obsidian: point a vault at .vault/ and the feature tags and document links render as a navigable graph network, while every document's frontmatter - tags, dates, and related: wiki-links - shows up as first-class properties.

A vaultspec project's vault in Obsidian: the whole document corpus as a graph, and an accepted ADR open beside it with its tags and related records one click away.

A vault that audits itself

Structure only helps if it holds. vaultspec-core vault check runs a battery of validators over the corpus - frontmatter, tags, links, dangling references, leftover placeholders, plan schema, encoding - and every finding ships with a fix hint, with --fix applying the safe ones automatically:

Ask your history questions

A vault is only as useful as its recall. The optional sister project vaultspec-rag indexes both the vault and the codebase for hybrid semantic search, so agents (and you) can ask why something was decided and get the decision record back:

MCP server

vaultspec-core ships a Model Context Protocol server, and vaultspec-core install drops its .mcp.json by default. Seven tools cover the everyday surface - find, create, edit, status, check, plan_progress, plan_edit - and a discover/invoke gateway reaches the rest of the CLI. Where the server is connected, the synced rules treat it as the primary transport, falling back to CLI verbs for structural and sync operations. The launch command in .mcp.json follows the install mode - uvx in tool mode, uv run in dependency mode. See the MCP reference for setup and the tool catalog.

Learn more

Guide	What it covers
Framework manual	The development workflow, skills, agents, and customization
CLI reference	Every command, flag, and option for vaultspec-core
MCP reference	The MCP server tools, setup, and configuration

The vaultspec family

The family has three focused responsibilities: vaultspec-core governs the workflow and vault; vaultspec-rag retrieves decisions and code by meaning; and vaultspec-dashboard is the visual workspace that aggregates those views.

Status, help, and license

vaultspec-core is actively developed. The version badge shows the current release. File bugs and questions on the issue tracker. Bug reports, feature ideas, and pull requests are welcome. vaultspec-core is released under the MIT License.