spec-init

Bootstrapping traceable specifications requires a Spec-Driven Development approach that drafts requirements, design, and tasks while enforcing lifecycle frontmatter and requirement-to-design traceability. This keeps engineering artifacts aligned from the start.

EARS acceptance criteria are testable requirement patterns used in specification-driven engineering workflows. You need them when creating long-lived artifacts like APIs, CLIs, pipelines, or shared libraries to ensure requirements remain unambiguous and verifiable.

Bootstrap a spec directory by running an initialization command with a kebab-case feature name to generate scaffolding stage by stage. This creates a specs/<feature-name>/ structure containing requirements, design, optional research, and tasks.

Yes, Spec-Driven Development suits long-lived engineering work including shared libraries and data pipelines. It guides requirements discovery and drafts design and research docs, ensuring traceability conventions are applied to durable repository artifacts.

The best way to align software requirements with design and tasks is enforcing traceability conventions and a spec review gate before task generation. This ensures design decisions explicitly map back to discovered requirements.

Feature requirements lack traceability and open questions when not generated through a guided requirements interview with explicit needs-clarification markers. Establishing lifecycle frontmatter and EARS patterns forces explicit open questions and design traceability.