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OpenSpec and Spec Kit

OpenSpec is an independent project under the MIT license, maintained by Fission AI and OpenSpec contributors. Spec Kit is an independent project under the MIT license, maintained by GitHub. Neither is part of maestria, and maestria does not require, install, or manage either tool.

OpenSpec is a lightweight spec framework for capturing what to build and tracking how the work evolves. It keeps specs in openspec/specs and active proposals in openspec/changes.

Spec Kit is a spec-driven toolkit for defining what to build before building it with any AI coding agent. It keeps feature specs in specs/<feature> alongside a project constitution.

maestria detects specs owned by other tools and references them read-only. If a project already uses OpenSpec (openspec/specs or openspec/changes) or Spec Kit (specs/<feature> plus constitution), the spec-contract skill carries pointers to that owning truth across steps and leaves those files to their owning workflow.

Absence of a spec is normal; tiny work skips the header.

Install and update specs with their own upstream instructions. Run these commands yourself; maestria never runs installs for you.

OpenSpec:

Terminal window
npm install -g @fission-ai/openspec@latest

Then initialize inside your project:

Terminal window
openspec init

Spec Kit (replace vX.Y.Z with a tag from the Spec Kit releases page):

Terminal window
uv tool install specify-cli --from git+https://github.com/github/[email protected]

Then initialize inside your project:

Terminal window
specify init <PROJECT_NAME>

Work in the owning tool first (OpenSpec or Spec Kit), then let maestria reference the result. The spec-contract header points at the existing spec, and each step keeps carrying that pointer while the owning workflow stays in charge of its own files.