SpecKit Integration

How to use GitHub Spec-Kit alongside the toolkit for spec-driven development.

Overview

SpecKit and the toolkit are complementary:

SpecKit	Toolkit
"What to build"	"Build it safely"
Requirements to tasks	Quality to deployment
Specification-focused	Enforcement-focused

Together they provide structured requirements, research-backed validation, quality enforcement, and safe deployment.

Setup

Install SpecKit CLI

# Using uv (recommended)
uv tool install specify-cli --from git+https://github.com/github/spec-kit.git

# Or run without installing
uvx --from git+https://github.com/github/spec-kit.git specify --help

Initialize a project

# New project
specify init my-project --ai claude

# Existing project
cd existing-project
specify init . --ai claude

Combined workflow

1. Specification phase — use SpecKit to define and validate requirements
2. Planning phase — /2-plan uses the spec to create implementation plans
3. Build phase — implementation follows the spec
4. Review phase — /4-review validates against spec compliance
5. Deploy phase — /5-deploy includes spec-based verification

Using /specify-and-validate

The toolkit includes a command that bridges SpecKit and the workflow:

/specify-and-validate "User authentication system"

This creates a validated specification in .specify/ (with per-feature specs under specs/) that guides subsequent phases.

SPECchen

For product design, use /pd-5-specchen to break a PRD into implementation-sized feature briefs (SPECchen) that are compatible with SpecKit for development handoff.

See Product Design Workflow for details.