The lifecycle

SpecForge fuses two methodologies into one flow: AI-DLC’s phases (Inception → Construction → Operations) provide the spine, and spec-kit’s artifacts (constitution, spec, plan, tasks) fill each phase. Every step writes to a committed specforge/ workspace, so the work survives context resets and travels with your pull requests.

Inception — decide WHAT and WHY

Step	Command	Output
Bootstrap	/specforge:init	specforge/ workspace + input templates
Principles	/specforge:constitution	constitution.md (soft gates)
(Brownfield)	/specforge:reverse-engineer	specs/000-baseline/* from existing code
Specify	/specforge:specify	specs/NNN/spec.md (requirements, user stories)
Clarify	/specforge:clarify	resolve [NEEDS CLARIFICATION] via a questions file
Approve	/specforge:approve specify	marks the spec approved

The spec is intentionally implementation-free — WHAT and WHY only. Unknowns become [NEEDS CLARIFICATION] markers, never guesses.

Construction — decide HOW and build

Step	Command	Output
Plan	/specforge:plan	plan.md + research.md, data-model.md, contracts/, quickstart.md
Approve	/specforge:approve plan	opens the code-edit gate
Tasks	/specforge:tasks	tasks.md (ordered, [P] parallel tags, traceable)
Analyze	/specforge:analyze	consistency & coverage report (read-only)
Implement	/specforge:implement	code, task-by-task, under the gate

Approving both specify and plan is the single event that unblocks coding. For unattended delivery, the Ralph loop works the task list to completion — still under the gate.

Operations — ship & own it

/specforge:operate writes an operations.md (deploy · runbook · observability · rollback · handoff) for a completed feature. See Operations.

The artifact store

specforge/
├── constitution.md   # principles
├── state.md          # gate source of truth (active feature, approvals, fast-track)
├── audit.md          # append-only log of every transition
├── inputs/           # vision.md + tech-environment.md (human-authored)
└── specs/NNN-feature/{spec,plan,tasks,research,data-model,quickstart}.md + contracts/

Because everything is on disk, /specforge:status shows where you are and /specforge:resume continues after a compaction or a break.