What problem does it solve?
Backend services with existing legacy code and scattered, outdated documentation often lack a centralized, reliable specification for spec-driven development, leading to wasted time reconciling conflicting docs, guessing business logic from stale notes, and risky drift between code and documentation.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Full source code reverse-engineering: Reads every file in a backend service's
src/ directory to capture actual behavior, business rules, and side effects, rather than relying on outdated legacy docs.
- Scattered doc consolidation: Merges docs spread across package
docs/ folders into a standardized central spec structure aligned with team conventions.
- Drift detection and resolution: Identifies mismatches between code, OpenAPI contracts, and legacy documentation, with a gated workflow to resolve all drift before finalizing specs.
- Automated consistency checks: Includes a reference implementation for a
spec:consistency CI gate that validates cross-doc links, shared constants (like role lists and password policies), and alignment between prose and code.
- Re-audit lifecycle: Provides a formal process for re-verifying implemented specs to catch drift over time, without ad-hoc patching that leaves specs in an unreliable state.
Use case: A team maintaining a legacy auth service with code in
backend/auth/ and docs scattered across backend/auth/docs/ can use this skill to produce a verified, implemented spec in docs/specs/backend/auth/ ready for spec-driven feature development.
Quick Start
Use the backend-service-spec-bootstrap skill to bootstrap a complete, verified spec for your legacy backend service by confirming its package path when prompted.
