“You can outsource thinking. You can't outsource understanding”
— Andrej Karpathy
spec-ss
SPEC-SS is a development workflow for working with a coding agent. Every task goes through the same six phases in the same order: Specify, Plan, Execute, Check, Secure, Ship. The agent never writes code before the work is well understood and agreed upon, and never ships it before it is proven.
How to installThe six phases at a glance
Specify
From requirements to detailed design docs
Plan
Turn the design into a plan
Execute
Agents work their magic
Check
It works? Prove it!
Secure
Review loop
Ship
Open the PR and monitor CI
- SPEC build the change
- SS guard it and deliver it
Why every task, and why in order
SPEC · build
Understand, then write
Specify and Plan settle what to build before a line of code exists, so the agent does not guess. Execute writes the code test first. Check walks every changed user flow end to end, the way a person would.
SS · guard and deliver
Prove, then ship
Secure reviews the whole branch against fixed criteria before anyone else sees it. Ship opens the pull request only when tests, lint, type check and build pass, and watches CI until it is green.
Each phase consumes what the previous one produced: the design doc feeds the plan, the plan drives execution, Check verifies the result, the review gates the pull request. Skipping a phase removes the input the next one needs. Small tasks move through the phases quickly. They still move through all six.
Every tool here is a recommendation
The workflow is the six phases and what each one must produce. The tools named on each phase page are the author's picks, the ones this workflow was built and tested with. Any of them can be replaced by another plugin, skill or prompt that does the same job. The Install page has the prompt in two versions: one with the recommended tools, and one with a placeholder in each tool slot.