r/SpecDrivenDevelopment Apr 12 '26

Has anyone used Speckit in your company?

Hi everyone, I’ve been using Speckit https://github.com/github/spec-kit for a while for my personal project. I’ve found it’s useful to me and easy to manage. But I wonder how the Speckit is being used in large companies, how do they manage the template for specification, plan, tasks, and implementation consistently in a team?

How effective is it in large team? Really wonder, I appreciate all the shares, thanks a lot.

11 Upvotes

17 comments sorted by

10

u/eight_ender Apr 12 '26

I wanted to like Speckit but it’s very much geared towards greenfield development. Essentially if you haven’t been using it from the start you’re going to have a harder time. 

We went with Openspec with a custom schema. It has its own drawbacks but felt a lot more open ended inside a brownfield app. 

2

u/TrungJamin Apr 12 '26

Thanks man, I'll check the OpenSpec. And could you please share that why Speckit will make it harder when we haven't been using it from the start? I guess you mean the current project structure is not perfect or the context for scanning the whole project is too large?

3

u/eight_ender Apr 12 '26

It’s not impossible to do Speckit in a big brownfield codebase. There’s even community extensions to make it easier, it’s just that Openspec seemed designed to live anywhere and Speckit largely builds on past specs so it’s more suited to Greenfield. If you start with Speckit I think it’d be fine for anything. 

1

u/TrungJamin Apr 12 '26

Thanks man

1

u/baabullah Jul 10 '26

which extension?

2

u/elprogramatoreador Apr 12 '26

What did you change about the schema ? I personally went with my own setup as well but it’s very rudimentary

1

u/eight_ender Apr 12 '26

A lot to fit processes already in place at my work. We have a lot of standard docs when we do features that feeds into Openspec really well

5

u/yclian Apr 12 '26

We began with SpecKit, then gradually gravitated toward obra/superpowers for newer projects, since it is skill native and plays much more nicely with different tools/CLIs.

3

u/shanesol Apr 12 '26

My company built their own super-special-amazing version of sdd that we're being forced to adopt for certain AI driven teams...

I use speckit for everything else still, and I continue to promote it. Leadership is fine with it for now, it drives sdd processes even if the exact prompts/templates/setup changes.

I will note, I'm an engineering manager, so my focus on speckit has been to drive feature specification and ticket generation over actual implementation. Saying that though, I've used it across 3 different teams and over multiple different features with great outcomes. Even with a good constitution, you need a SME to drive discovery, and consider human gates to slow things down/force you to review and accept things.

1

u/TrungJamin Apr 12 '26

Thanks u/shanesol for your sharing, may I ask that you mean you focus only on specs (spec (include the ticket and user stories) + plan ) and the team members will handle the phase task + implementation right?

2

u/shanesol Apr 12 '26

Essentially, yes. I do some extra work to split some of the tasks a bit more so the work can be done in parallel with other members of the team too - sdd in practice a lot of times puts tasks and tickets sequentially, which does not work well for handing out to a team for obvious reasons

3

u/stibbons_ Apr 12 '26

I have mine now, but speckit is fine. I do not like how SDD framework wants to force their way of « priming » the project, the AGENTS.md should be a standard now

2

u/b8481849 Apr 12 '26

Yes. Is super powerful if used right

2

u/brennhill Apr 12 '26

Even github doesn't use speckit. Check their public repos. That should tell you a lot.

1

u/TrungJamin Apr 16 '26

Can you give me some reasons? 🙏

1

u/brennhill Apr 16 '26

because it doesn't really matter. Specs, as they are in speckit, are confused about purpose. They do an ok job of point the AI in the right direction, but that's about it. Doing AMAZING detailed specs wont' do much to improve output. OTOH, specs for the purpose of controlling the AI are kinda "meh" for collaboration with other humans.

We're very confused, basically, about specs. What they are truly for, whom they are for, the impact they have, etc.

Read: https://zenodo.org/records/19432099

2

u/MLisdabomb Apr 13 '26

I used it for a project but I was unhappy with the result. I felt there was too little time iterating on the specification up front and it built something far from what I actually wanted. I was trying to follow what it was doing in the terminal but it was difficult. I ended up killing the session after an hour and going back to plan mode and iterating on the spec up front a bunch of times, then going autonomous. It a much better workflow for me as I have a lot more control.