speckit-tasks

To generate an executable tasks.md from spec-kit artifacts, you need to process your plan.md and spec.md files to extract feature names, tech stack, and user stories. This produces a dependency-ordered task list with strict checklist formatting.

Creating a dependency graph for user stories involves analyzing spec.md priorities to establish an execution order. The process identifies parallel execution opportunities across user stories and outputs structured task phases grouped by setup and foundational requirements.

The required checklist formatting for tasks.md uses a strict structure of dash, bracket, TaskID, Priority, User Story number, and file path. This deterministic format ensures reliable task completion tracking and validation within the engineering workflow.

You can augment task generation by including optional design documents like data-model.md, contracts, research.md, and quickstart.md alongside plan.md and spec.md. These supporting artifacts provide additional context to refine the generated executable tasks.

Spec-kit supports extension hooks configured in .specify/extensions.yml for before_tasks and after_tasks. The system reads these hook configurations and prints the appropriate hook blocks during task generation without evaluating the hook conditions.

The best way to group executable tasks is to separate them into setup and foundational phases first, followed by individual user story phases. This approach ensures dependencies are resolved correctly and includes independent test criteria for each phase.