What problem does it solve?
This Skill converts informal, natural-language feature descriptions into structured, planning-ready specifications and automates creating the corresponding feature branch so product and engineering teams can move faster and reduce misunderstandings.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Branch creation: Generates a concise short-name and invokes the project script to create and check out a new feature branch, returning machine-readable JSON with branch and spec paths.
- Template-driven spec authoring: Fills the .specify/templates/spec-template.md structure with actors, scenarios, functional requirements, success criteria, entities, and documented assumptions.
- Quality validation and checklists: Produces FEATURE_DIR/checklists/requirements.md, runs iterative validation against the checklist, surfaces up to three critical clarifying questions, and updates the spec until it passes checks or reports outstanding issues.
- Extension hook support: Detects and lists or executes pre- and post-specify hooks defined in .specify/extensions.yml, handling optional and mandatory hooks according to configuration.
- Use case: A product manager types a brief feature description into chat and receives a ready-to-plan spec file, a quality checklist, and a newly created branch for engineering work.
Quick Start
Invoke the skill with a concise feature description such as: /speckit.specify Add user authentication to generate the feature spec, validation checklist, and new branch.
