Did I use the speckit best practice correctly?

[itrufeng]

Officially Documented Workflow

According to the official documentation, the workflow for using SpecKit is:

constitution → spec → plan → tasks → implement

There are also optional steps:

• clarify (before plan): used to supplement and refine the spec
• checklist (after spec/clarify): used to verify whether the spec is complete
• analyze (between tasks and implement): used to ensure the entire pipeline is consistent (constitution → spec → plan → tasks)

References: Commands and Guide details

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My Understanding

From my experience using it, during the analyze step, SpecKit provides suggestions such as modifying the tasks, plan, or even the spec.

When it suggests modifying tasks:

I prefer not to manually edit the file. Instead, I would rather modify the plan and regenerate the tasks. This is because the tasks file contains many implicit SpecKit conventions (e.g., Phase, checkpoints, [P], [US], [T00X], etc.), which are auto-generated. I’m not familiar with these conventions, and even if I try to imitate them, the internal references become difficult to manage.

When it suggests modifying the plan:

The plan also has its own structure and syntax, which differs from the original description I provided when using the /plan command. I’m more comfortable refining the original plan input rather than directly editing plan.md, and then rerunning /plan, followed by /tasks and /analyze.

When it suggests modifying the spec:

The spec also follows its own structure and syntax, which differs from the original /plan input description. Fortunately, I can use /clarify to enrich the user story details, and then rerun /checklist, /plan, /tasks, and /analyze.

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My Questions

1. Is my understanding correct? And is my approach to handling tasks, plan, and spec appropriate?
2. If I run analyze, update the spec, and then run analyze again and receive more suggestions—can I keep repeating this process until there are no more issues, and only then proceed to implement? Is it acceptable to iterate on the analyze step multiple times like this?

[mnriem]

You have 4 options when it comes to modifying what Spec Kit produces:

1. The core commands
2. The optional commands, like clarify, analyze and checklist
3. Ask your agent to edit the files
4. Do it yourself

There is no hard and set rule for when to use which and how many times.

[itrufeng]

Thanks.