Spec Harvest

Spec Harvest

Extracts a customer-value feature inventory, an SDLC risk assessment, and per-feature PRDs from a working prototype — without carrying the prototype's implementation choices into the spec. /pm:harvest runs all four phases end-to-end via an agent team; /pm:assess runs phase 3 alone against an existing inventory.

When to Use

Activate when:

• Handing a prototype to an engineering team that will rebuild it for production.
• Reverse-engineering prototype code into user stories and acceptance criteria.
• Assessing licensing, security, or supportability risk before a production build.
• Reading bees epics alongside prototype code to produce a coding spec.
• Separating customer-value behavior from prototype shortcuts before scoping work.

Four Phases

1. Discovery — pure inventory, no judgment. Record what is observed: routes/pages, data models, external integrations, dependencies, technology stack and framework choices. Every entry carries a confidence tag (see Anti-Fabrication below).
2. Separation — split discovery findings into (a) customer-value features: behaviors users actually want regardless of implementation — what a user can do, what data shapes and interactions matter, what outcomes the user cares about; and (b) prototype shortcuts that must NOT carry forward: zero/minimal authentication, hardcoded data, scale/performance assumptions.
3. SDLC assessment — run references/sdlc-checklist.md against the prototype: licensing, security, supportability. /pm:assess invokes this phase standalone.
4. Spec generation — three artifact types: the feature inventory (templates/feature-inventory.md), the SDLC assessment (templates/sdlc-assessment.md), and one PRD per major feature area authored via /pm:prd in grounded mode.

Team Shape

| Agent | Model | Phase | Responsibility | |---|---|---|---| | pm-lead | opus | all | Orchestrates the team, sequences phases, aggregates worker reports. | | pm-discovery | haiku | 1 | Runs one of four inventory shards: routes-pages, data-models, integrations-deps-stack, bees-map. | | pm-separator | sonnet | 2 | Splits discovery output into customer-value features vs. prototype shortcuts. | | pm-sdlc-assessor | sonnet | 3 | Runs the SDLC checklist, produces risk findings. | | pm-spec-writer | sonnet | 4 | Writes the feature inventory and SDLC assessment artifacts. | | pm-prd-author | sonnet | 4 | Authors one PRD per major feature area via /pm:prd. |

pm-lead never runs discovery, separation, or assessment itself — it spawns workers per phase and aggregates their reports. Phase 1 fans out to three-to-four pm-discovery shards in parallel — the bees-map shard runs only when .bees/ exists; phases 2–4 run one worker at a time against the accumulated findings.

Implementation-Agnostic Writing Rules

Every artifact this skill produces describes behaviors, not implementations; data shapes, not schemas; interactions, not APIs; user experiences, not frameworks. Name the WHAT and the WHY, never the HOW.

Portability test: a different engineering team with a different technology stack could implement the spec without reading the prototype's source.

| Implementation-specific (reject) | Implementation-agnostic (accept) | |---|---| | When I POST to /api/v1/cart/checkout with {"items": [...]} | When they click "Checkout" | | Then the orders row in Postgres has status_id = 3 | Then they see "Order confirmed" | | When the GenServer receives a :checkout cast | When they fill in "Shipping address" with "123 Main St" |

A finding that names a database column, an HTTP verb, a process model, or a specific library belongs in the discovery shard's evidence trail, not in a user story or acceptance criterion. references/user-story-format.md has the full authoring rules and a worked example.

Bees Integration (Read-Only)

pm-discovery's bees-map shard reads .bees/ for roadmap intent (open issues) and completed-work provenance (closed issues, cited by ID) when the prototype has a bees tracker. No phase in this skill ever calls a bees write command — bees list, bees show, bees ready, bees prime, bees dep list, and bees comment list are the entire surface. Full detection and mapping rules live in references/bees-to-spec.md.

SDLC Assessment

The checklist in references/sdlc-checklist.md covers three areas — licensing (SPDX identifiers, copyleft exposure, vendored code provenance), security (OWASP Top 10 2025 categories), and supportability (observability, rollback, secrets handling) — each with prototype-specific evidence to collect and typical shortcuts to flag. pm-sdlc-assessor runs every checklist row against the prototype and records findings with a severity and a confidence tag.

User Story Format

Feature inventory entries use a Gherkin dialect that mirrors the qa plugin's parser (plugins/tools/qa/skills/qa/references/gherkin-format.md, cited as source): Feature: once, optional Given-only Background:, one or more Scenario: blocks each needing at least one When and one Then. Full authoring rules, cucumber step semantics, and a worked example are in references/user-story-format.md.

Anti-Fabrication Confidence Tags

Every claim in every artifact this skill produces carries one of two tags:

• [seen-in-code: ] — the claim traces to a specific file the agent read.
• [inferred — needs verification] — the claim is a reasonable inference (from a route name, a bees issue, an incomplete code path) that no file confirms directly.

An entry with neither tag is incomplete. /core:anti-fabrication governs this rule; load it at the start of every phase.

Example evidence line from a feature-inventory entry:

- Checkout is blocked when the cart has zero items. [seen-in-code: lib/store/cart.ex]
- Guest checkout does not require an account. [inferred — needs verification]

Output Convention

Artifacts are markdown only. OUTPUT_DIR defaults to docs/pm/ in the target repo. Filenames carry an ISO date:

• /-feature-inventory.md
• /-sdlc-assessment.md
• /prd/-.md

Reference files

• references/user-story-format.md — Gherkin dialect for user stories, cucumber step semantics, confidence annotation syntax, good-vs-bad examples, one worked example.
• references/bees-to-spec.md — read-only bees command surface, detection rule, mapping workflow from bees issues to feature-inventory entries.
• references/sdlc-checklist.md — licensing, security (OWASP Top 10 2025), and supportability checklist rows for pm-sdlc-assessor.
• templates/feature-inventory.md — copyable skeleton for the phase 4 feature inventory artifact.
• templates/sdlc-assessment.md — copyable skeleton for the phase 4 SDLC assessment artifact.

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: vinnie357
• Source: vinnie357/claude-skills
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.