Specs-Dev Workflow

A disciplined, review-gated development workflow: plan first, implement in phases, review between phases.

Workflow

Phase	Purpose	Gate
1. Discovery	Understand requirements	User approves summary
2. Planning	Create reviewed plan	User approves plan
3. Implementation	Phase-by-phase coding	Each phase reviewed

Phase 1: Discovery

Goal: Shared understanding before planning.

1. State your understanding of the request
2. Ask clarifying questions (goals, constraints, success criteria, out-of-scope)
3. Iterate until clear
4. Present final requirements summary

Gate: "Do I understand correctly? Should I proceed to planning?" — Wait for approval.

Phase 2: Planning

Goal: Create a comprehensive, reviewed implementation plan.

1. Draft plan using references/templates/plan.md
2. Review with reviewer subagent (see references/agents/reviewer.md) — max 3 rounds
3. Integrate feedback, iterate until approved
4. If still not approved after 3 rounds — summarize unresolved concerns and ask user whether to revise scope, continue anyway, or stop
5. Resolve all Open Questions — convert remaining unknowns into explicit assumptions before proceeding
6. Present plan to user — wait for approval
7. Create session folder: .agents/sessions/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{feature-name}/
8. Save plan.md, tasks.md, and handoff.md (initialized from references/templates/handoff.md) to session folder

Plan quality check:

• Every requirement from Phase 1 addressed
• Tasks are actionable and logically ordered
• Testing strategy specified
• Risks captured
• No unresolved Open Questions (converted to assumptions or removed)

Phase 3: Implementation

Goal: Implement the plan phase-by-phase with reviews between phases.

Read references/loop.md before starting. It defines the phase loop.

Summary of the loop:

For each phase in the plan:
  1. Spawn worker subagent → implements all tasks, commits each one
  2. Worker writes phase summary to handoff.md
  3. Spawn reviewer subagent → reads handoff.md, reviews the phase
  4. If changes needed → fix in main agent context
  5. Continue to next phase

After the last phase: run full test suite, update session docs, confirm with user.

Subagents:

• Worker: references/agents/worker.md
• Reviewer: references/agents/reviewer.md
• Handoff protocol: references/handoff.md

Session Structure

.agents/sessions/{YYYY-MM-DD}-{feature-name}/
├── plan.md       # Strategic plan
├── tasks.md      # Task checklist
└── handoff.md    # Phase handoff log (appended each phase)

References

File	When to Read
references/loop.md	Start of Phase 3
references/handoff.md	Start of Phase 3
references/agents/reviewer.md	Plan/phase reviews
references/agents/worker.md	Phase implementation
references/templates/	Phase 2 (plan creation)