A community-maintained directory of AI agent instruction sets (skills) for the SpecOps methodology — a specification-driven approach to software development and legacy system modernization.
Skills are human-authored Markdown guides that teach AI coding agents how to perform specialized tasks. They encode domain-specific procedural knowledge — patterns, terminology, analysis steps, and output formats — that models don't reliably possess from training data alone. For more on the role of skills in the SpecOps methodology, see Instruction Set Examples.
This directory links to externally hosted skills shared by the SpecOps community. If you've built a SpecOps skill and want it listed here, open a new issue or submit a PR.
| Skill | Description | Author |
|---|---|---|
| specops | Spec-driven development workflow where specs are the source of truth. Covers philosophy, spec writing, directory structure, templates, how agents use specs, and project setup. Includes a spec drift auditor. | Jarvus Innovations |
| Skill | Description | Author |
|---|---|---|
| specops-initial-plan | Create an initial SpecOps plan — extract a comprehensive, implementation-language-agnostic specification from an existing codebase, module, or workflow. | Ryan Mahoney |
| specops-analysis | Perform a SpecOps analysis to produce a detailed 11-section specification from existing artifacts, including business rules, decision logic, defaults, thresholds, and policies. | Ryan Mahoney |
| specops-refactor-plan | Create a refactor-focused SpecOps plan for a specific source folder and goal — preserves behavioral contracts while producing a decision-complete refactor strategy. | Ryan Mahoney |
| Skill | Description | Author |
|---|---|---|
| specops-make-spec | Convert a verified SpecOps analysis into a deterministic implementation specification with architecture, acceptance criteria, and sequenced implementation steps. | Ryan Mahoney |
| Skill | Description | Author |
|---|---|---|
| specops-ambiguity-audit | Audit an analysis spec for ambiguities that would force an implementer to make undocumented judgment calls, then resolve them by researching the legacy source code via parallel subagents. | Ryan Mahoney |
| specops-spec-coherence | Audit a set of analysis specs for cross-spec coherence — dependency order, pairwise integration contracts, shared data models, side-effect ownership, and terminology — then patch gaps. | Ryan Mahoney |
| specops-spec-conformance | Audit an implementation spec against its source analysis spec for dropped, weakened, or contradicted requirements, then patch the implementation spec. | Ryan Mahoney |
| specops-implementation-drift | Re-analyze migrated code, diff against the original analysis spec, and generate corrective specs for each behavioral divergence so the next code-gen iteration converges. | Ryan Mahoney |
| Skill | Description | Author |
|---|---|---|
| specops-contract-tests | Generate framework-agnostic pytest contract tests from a SpecOps analysis file, covering interfaces, data models, policy rules, behavioral scenarios, error handling, and edge cases. | Ryan Mahoney |
| specops-integration-test | Generate integration tests for normative cross-module pathways discovered from analysis specs and the migrated call graph, reusing existing unit-test mocks. | Ryan Mahoney |
| Skill | Description | Author |
|---|---|---|
| specops-orchestrate-analysis | Orchestrate sequential subagents to generate one analysis per target from an initial plan, with per-target verification and fix-up loops. | Ryan Mahoney |
| specops-orchestrate-spec-create | Orchestrate sequential subagents to generate one implementation spec per analysis file, with per-file verification and fix-up loops. | Ryan Mahoney |
The skills above map to specific phases of a SpecOps migration:
1. specops-initial-plan → Discovery & assessment
2. specops-analysis → Specification generation (per module)
3. specops-ambiguity-audit → Harden each spec individually
4. specops-spec-coherence → Cross-spec consistency & implementation order
5. Domain experts verify specs
6. specops-make-spec → Implementation spec generation
7. specops-spec-conformance → Verify impl spec derives from analysis
8. Code generation
9. specops-contract-tests → Generate contract tests from specs
10. specops-integration-test → Generate cross-module integration tests
11. specops-implementation-drift → Verify migrated code matches analysis
12. Iterate until convergence
To list your skill here, open a PR that adds a row to the appropriate table above. Include:
- Link to the
SKILL.mdfile in your public repository - Description — one sentence summarizing what the skill does
- Author — link to the repository containing the skill
Skills should be human-authored, publicly accessible, and follow the SpecOps methodology.
- SpecOps Methodology — The specification-driven modernization methodology
- SpecOps AGENTS.md — Template AGENTS.md for SpecOps projects
- SpecOps Action — GitHub Action for spec change tracking
- SpecOps Demo — Example skills and specifications for IRS tax systems
- Instruction Set Examples — Detailed guide on building and sharing skills
This project is released under the MIT License.