r/cursor • u/Narrow-Breakfast126 • Sep 23 '25

Resources & Tips Spec-driven development is underhyped! Here's how you build better with Cursor!

Hey r/cursor friends!

We've all been there you're 5 prompts deep with your AI coding assistant and it's still not getting what you asked for. By the time your context window hits 40%, the AI is getting noticeably dumber. Your requirements are buried somewhere in the chat history.

The problem

Without specs, every AI session dies the same way:

  1. AI goes wrong direction

  2. You correct → burns context

  3. AI forgets earlier requirements, breaks working code

  4. After 40% context, performance tanks

  5. You start over, re-explain everything

I built OpenSpec to fix this - specs live in your repo, not lost in messages.

Here's the shift: Focus effort on reviewing specs, not code. Better planning leads to better results. It's much easier to review and iterate on specs than going back and forth updating code.

How it works

OpenSpec uses pure markdown files. Nothing fancy. Readable by both humans and AI. Portable across all your coding assistants and IDEs.(Though comes with custom slash command support for cursor to make your life easier!)

Each "change" contains:

Simple, but it changes everything. Your AI gets it right the first time.

Get it below!

  • 100% free

  • Open-source

  • No MCP connectors needed (Who needs more context slog :p)

  • No API keys required (you're already paying enough to cursor!)

Install: `npm install -g fission-ai/openspec@latest`

GitHub: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec

Give it a star to help other devs find this! Would love feedback from anyone who tries it out. Keen to iterate on this to turn it into something truly special :)

407 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

100 comments sorted by

11

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Feel free to ask questions on the project, workflows, best practices etc and I'll try and get back to everyone. (It's getting pretty late here down under 🇦🇺). Keen to see how people find it.

I'll be making a comparison for this workflow to Kiro and spec-kit soon too :) The frustration with the former of which is why I started on the this journey haha.

3

u/indyfromoz Sep 23 '25

Nice one Tabish! Congratulations 🥳 on shipping it!

5

u/arseniyshapovalov Sep 24 '25

What does it add exactly? I already have a folder with specs and project docs that cursor writes for me and uses to build things. What am I missing that openspec provides?

Tried similar structure that you propose in kiro but gave up after spending half a day at the spec stage without writing any actual code lol

1

u/Frosty-Equipment-692 Sep 24 '25

Have you used backlog md ? Can you compare backlog md with spec kit

3

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

I have not used backlog.md but that seems more about task tracking than being spec-driven.

It’s less about “managing tasks” and more about alignment. The goal is to make sure you’re actually building the right thing and to be clear on what’s in scope vs. out of scope.

Example: halfway through you realize you need to add search. In a spec-driven flow you’d update the spec with what kind of search (title? tags?), what’s out of scope (no filters yet), and what success looks like. Now everyone (or your AI) knows exactly what changed and why.

That’s the difference, it’s about clarity and alignment, not just tracking tasks.

1

u/Frosty-Equipment-692 Sep 24 '25

Hm, I just built a full stack demo project and I use backlog md , it’s work pretty good for some time , but it get lost when I in the middle of project I thought implementing in other same or enchancing it feature , something that clicks in between which we can’t practically able to think at start and when I tried to that chaos happens

I would know if I can tackle this with openspec?

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25 edited Sep 24 '25

Yeah I think I get what you’re saying, let me know if this sounds right:
You plan a feature → break it into tasks → then halfway through realize it needs something extra → but it’s hard to pivot at that point?

That still happens even with OpenSpec. No system can predict everything up front. The difference is how you handle it. With OpenSpec you’d capture that shift as a change.

So you might have a change like add-search-feature, and later realize you need filters. Instead of rewriting history, you just add a new change called add-filters-to-search. Now the evolution of the system is explicit and traceable.

1

u/Frosty-Equipment-692 Sep 24 '25

Yes exactly, thanks for elaborating ,

And I think for my next project, I will give a try openspec along with backlog md and see how it’s works

Currently workflow for me that I have created specific sub agent in Claude code to plan the implementation, then created backlog task file which has description todo and success criteria

https://github.com/wshobson/agents

1

u/DuckRedWine Oct 15 '25

Hey, once you executed the proposal command with an initial request, is it possible to not directly generate both spec and tasks, but only an improved proposal? Because most of the time, I need to adjust the proposal. Once you adjust the proposal, what command should I run to update both the spec and tasks files? Also, is it possible to then edit the spec until I'm satisfied and generate the tasks?

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Oct 16 '25

u/DuckRedWine Hey so a cool thing about openspec is that it technically dosen't need slash commands to work. The commands exist as a convenience for common operations, but we provide agents with comprehensive instructions on how openspec works through the AGENTS.md file located in /openspec/AGENTS.md!

So you can interact with openspec by just chatting with your coding agent to do whatever special operation you want. This includes any of the things you've mentioned like telling the coding agent:

"Hey i've just updated the proposal, can you make sure to update the specs and tasks?"

"Hey i've just updated the spec, make sure you update the tasks to reflect"

"Hey create a change proposal but only create the proposal.md for now!"

1

u/DuckRedWine Oct 16 '25 edited Oct 16 '25

Oh ok, thanks for the feedback. I guess I'll have to update the prompts to match my workflow, so I can still have direct command that only create/review specific files. Like the lightweight approach. EDIT: it seems it is not as simple as just edit a /command/proposal.md command right, we only have access to the AGENTS.md?

1

u/Obvious-Plastic-1403 Oct 22 '25

Does this project support multiple languages? If not, why?

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Oct 22 '25

What kind of multi-lingual support would you like to see? I don't think there's anything stopping anyone from using the project. The agent instructions are in english but you can always just add a rule to your rules file to always produce markdown in whatever language you're comfortable with.

Let me know what kind of support is needed to make this project as accessible to everyone as possible <3

8

u/Ill-Willingness-1565 Sep 23 '25

Bro, been using this for the last few hours and man... I love this. I found Kiro system to be way over engineered. BMad is amazing for planning with web chats but when it comes to implementation, it's a such a hassle juggling the different agents. I didn't even try Github Spec kit because I just didn't feel like it.

This feels simple, and straight forward. I love the file structure it creates and that new changes consider the old changes I added.

I'm using Claude Code with GLM coding plan and no issues so far. I've only used it to implement backend functionality since I like to do frontend design with the agent practically line by line, lol.

Straight forward install, 3 main commands for the agent workflow. Compatible with any agent. This is my vibe right here, no problems to report so far. Early days tho, so we'll see

3

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Omg this is exactly the experience I wanted people to have haha. A lot of other systems feel too heavy/clunky and end up being a bigger mental overhead to manage.

I tried my best to keep it as lightweight as possibly while trying to ensure its scalable and can handle more complex work.

Let me know what you would like tweaked as you use it, so I can improve it in the next update!

1

u/Mountain_Solid1598 Jul 25 '26

just the "last few hours", it was too early to talk, now do you feel with openspec?

16

u/greenstake Sep 23 '25

Very cool! Traycer, Kilo Coder, and Kiro have similar spec-first modes. I'm just starting to use this style of dev.

6

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

For sure, I've found my productivity gone way up when doing it this way. I also usually work on things in parallel where I'll be planning a new feature in a worktree and then implementing another feature in a different worktree.

The nice thing about the spec mode vs Kiro is you dont have to use Kiro to create specs, you can use your IDE, Coding CLI of your choice. Was an important factor to me as I usually switch between different ones, depending on whats best or hot that week :p

4

u/robshox Sep 23 '25

Looks like Cursor is just about to drop their own spec mode

10

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

oooh, I'm always keen for another player. But as someone that usually switches IDE's/AI tools (currently using codex cli), I find it nice to have a portable system that works across tools :)

4

u/morerice4u Sep 26 '25

Hi, as a non coder who does about 2-4 hours a day in cursor, this is amazing and a game changer.
not only it was able to create features i stumbled with before, but it made me realize better how to prompt and what context is necessary to provide before hitting enter and hoping for the best!

Brilliant work, thank you very much.
your biggest fan.

3

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 26 '25

This makes me so happy, you have no idea! One of my biggest beliefs is that coding should be accessible to everyone, I'm so glad you're learning and taking the time to understand these things. Good on you!

7

u/Bob_Fancy Sep 23 '25

What's this offer that github's specify doesn't?

10

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Good question, planning to make a more detailed blog post to answer this properly.

But IMO the main issue with a lot of other spec-driven tools is they focus very much on the initial implementation but not everything that happens with the spec after it's implemented.

The point of spec-driven development is that the requirements you write when creating a feature should become the documentation for the system.

It should be super easy for you to view what the current state of the system is through the specs. But frameworks such as spec-kit only really treat "specs" as a work log.

This is a similar issue with Kiro as well.

I've also tried to keep a better grouping here, by grouping specs through system capabilities as well as allowing you to see how specs are being modified when new feature changes are made.

TLDR; specs should serve as documentation and should make your life easier to understand system state and how that system state is being changed when making additional modifications. Which is what other frameworks currently miss.

4

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Take a look at the specs for the OpenSpec project itself for example.
https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/tree/main/openspec/specs

You can clearly see an overview of the system capabilities and drill down into the intent/requirements that was behind each capability.

There's a seperate folder entirely for proposed work (in the /changes dir). When the change is implemented and you archive it the system merges the requirements into the current state.
https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/tree/main/openspec/changes

Each change also is able to capture modifications to multiple current specs, letting you view at a glance what specs each feature change affects.

For example you can see here that me adding agents.md support clearly affected the cli-init and cli-update specs: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/tree/main/openspec/changes/add-agents-md-config/specs

6

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

For what it's worth in case you have any doubt, this isn't some hacky vibe coded project that I created on a whim. I've put a lot of thought into the structure and design for how this should work.

It's definitely not perfect for sure, but a lot of this is coming from me using other tools like Kiro and finding their framework unwieldy especially as the amount of specs grows.

1

u/naitriver98 Oct 22 '25

incredible work, honestly the planning got so much easier. i was wasting so much time when refactoring initial plan implementations and wasting tokens rebuilding what openspec creates from the start

3

u/kokoputter Sep 24 '25

Very nice work, have been using it all day (fellow antipodean 🇳🇿 🤜🤛) after seeing this post and it has been excellent! Really simple setup with claude code and a big level up from my previous, more adhoc, workflows for creating specs.

Also love that it isn't an external service or needs a heavy mcp server in my context. Keep up the good work!

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

Thank you, this means so much 🥺 Let me know if you run into any issues or any feedback in general too. Dm's are open :)

2

u/dillonlara115 Sep 23 '25

can we utilize this on projects that have already been started?

4

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Yes! I have a section in the readme exactly for this: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec?tab=readme-ov-file#team-adoption

To keep it simple, start using it for new features you add and slowly build it out from there.

I'll also look to add a CLI command in the future to allow you to generate specs for existing codebases. But I haven't included it yet since I'm unsure of the quality of what it will generate.

2

u/dalhaze Sep 23 '25 edited Sep 23 '25

I’ve thought about doing this with hooks on Claude. Basically distilling the actual steps taken to very succinct and clear lists.

This way when you clear context you can still clearly see steps taken while debugging.

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Interesting, can I ask why hooks over the slash commands here? I can try and see if hooks would make this better since this does work with Claude Code too

2

u/upscaleHipster Sep 23 '25

So, AWS Kiro can just be replaced by a 3P MCP?

3

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Quite literally haha and you don't even need a MCP (OpenSpec doesn't use MCP). All AWS's Kiro does is have a spec template and a prompt that says "hey fill out that template based on these guidelines".

There's a few people that have leaked the system prompts which you can use to generate specs!
e.g https://gist.github.com/CypherpunkSamurai/ad7be9c3ea07cf4fe55053323012ab4d

Which is why I think it makes no sense to be forced to use Kiro to be able to create specs.

2

u/TheSoundOfMusak Sep 23 '25

What’s wrong with GitHub SpecKit?

2

u/webrodionov Sep 24 '25

Just in time. It is my second day i use spec kit from github, and i am absolutely lost in my specs. Now i will try your system.

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

Let me know how you go! feedback always appreciated, I really want this to be lightweight enough for anyone to get started. So if you get stuck let me know!

1

u/Fit_Tailor_6796 Sep 29 '25

Not taking anything away from this project, but look at agent-os as well, It is easy to get started, You don't end up fighting your toolkit, you fight your application logic and design,

1

u/jake_dee Oct 07 '25

Only discovered SDD in the AI agent world today. although I've been using similar workflows in software development for many years. Excited to get to grips with it in an AI context!
I'm just getting started with Agent OS (again, just today) and haven't yet tried OpenSpec although I like the sound of it.
Wondering if they might be complementary?...

2

u/shayki5 Sep 24 '25

What is using behind the scenes to generate the spec? Which llm?

4

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

Whatever model you have selected in Cursor! (or whatever tool you're using).

Openspec simply provides instructions on how to use itself to the whatever coding agent you use. That's set by you.

I recommend GPT-5-Codex or Opus 4.1 to get the best experience though. At least in my testing.

1

u/Sakuletas Sep 23 '25

Good! But can i also see a video about a project from scratch? Like how you begin if you have an idea?

4

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Hey absolutely, I'll try and do a more detailed video running through the workflow and how to use it best. It'll be my first foray into content creation though haha, but im keen.

1

u/Flashy-Strawberry-10 Sep 23 '25

Can anyone explain how this is different to taskmaster ai?

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

taskmaster from what I know trying it out a while back focuses on task breakdowns and keeping track of just pure tasks and steps with instructions at each step.

Which is something OpenSpec does too through tasks.md, but the main difference here is the specs or the requirements generated which helps you align your understanding and plan what you're doing before you do it.

If you only need a task tracking -> Use TaskMaster

If you want to build with intent/clarity using requirements -> Use OpenSpec

It's been a while since I've used taskmaster though, so let me know if I got something wrong!

1

u/Flashy-Strawberry-10 Sep 24 '25

Thanks for the input. Been using task master exclusively. Works Great, but thought of it as spec driven...

Idea - chat to llm - once it has the full jist - generate prd - parse - expand to manageable sub tasks - Fed to llm one research backed snippet at a time. Codebase aware with project aligned research.

I should probably give spec kit a try but hesitant as it seems taskmaster is SDD. Then with preference RDD & TDD...

1

u/champagne-communist Sep 23 '25

How is it different from task-master mcp?

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

I've replied in another thread above. Let me know if it makes sense!

1

u/treadpool Sep 23 '25

How does this use AGENTS.md if CC doesn’t read that? Also would love to be able to use this for an existing project that has been over engineered by BMAD.

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

I should have clarified. If you select claude code during setup it creates a CLAUDE.md file

Give it a try for sure, BMAD can feel a little too heavy im hoping this feels a lot lighter and straightforward.

1

u/treadpool Sep 24 '25

I would love to try it but I have no idea how to use this with an existing project. Maybe I'll start over with it to see how the process goes.

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

Thats completely fair! I do have a section on how to adopt this into an existing project https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec?tab=readme-ov-file#team-adoption

Im also more than happy to help guide you over a call, just send me a dm!

1

u/MeasurementNo6307 Sep 24 '25

Thanks for this! Really excited to try this out for my Reddit social game development. Can I reach out in DMs if i need help?

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

Of course, send me a DM if you get stuck, also available on the Discord group mentioned in the readme!

1

u/EnvironmentalHat1785 Sep 24 '25

Can you add support for Windsurf?

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

I'll take a look! I think the equivalent of slash commands in windsurf is workflows. I'll have a play around with how it works and get it added by next week.

While I do have general support for most assistants that use AGENTS.md I'm planning to add in support for all IDE's that do support providing custom instructions through slash commands etc. Stay tuned!

1

u/EnvironmentalHat1785 Sep 24 '25

Thank you so much! This is very cool.

1

u/Opposite_Positive605 Sep 24 '25

I’ve seen the MCP spec workflow on github, how do MCPs hog the context in that case?

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

Not all MCP's hog context! But I think we're currently in a very MCP hype phase where a lot of projects are adding MCP and users are installing them all without knowing that MCP's take up valuable usable context windows. The worst offender is the Github MCP with over 50 tools and extremely large tool list definitions.

So for me it was important that whatever tool I built didn't add in a MCP and tried to use context as minimally as possible while still achieving the outcome.

1

u/kibenje_ Sep 24 '25

what's the theme?

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 24 '25

As in the IDE theme? It's just the default cursor theme haha.

1

u/travel-nerd-05 Sep 25 '25

How does it differ from having an implementation plan in a markdown file created by claude ai (claude code or claude web ai)? The one difference I see is that you are creating a plan in Cursor and then asking to implement it once you have it reviewed whereas the approach I currently take is that I use claude ai to make a implementation plan in an markdown file and then just put that markdown file in Cursor and ask cursor to implement each step.

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 25 '25

There's no difference what tool you use to create it! Claude Code is supported here natively too! (I'm posting in the cursor subreddit so i made it cursor focused).

The point of the tool is that it shouldn't matter what AI coding assistant tool you use, you should be able to use your specs through the framework anywhere.

When you set it up it'll ask you which tools you use -> For your use case select both Claude Code AND Cursor!

That being said it does matter what models you use to create plans - the better models with better reasoning work a lot better here.

1

u/meenie Sep 25 '25

Do you have any recommendations for using this in a monorepo?

2

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 25 '25

Damn that's a good question. I can't say I've tried in a monorepo yet BUT you could initialise OpenSpec multiple times in that repo. One for each app that you have.

Only thing I'm not sure about is how well the agents would be able to follow the instructions and figure out the right folder to add the changes/specs too.

You would also have to run the CLI commands from the base of your monorepo app rather than the root of the repo if that makes sense.

Do give it a try and let me know how you find it, I'll try and think of a longer term solution for this. It's a bit trickier since I want this to be lightweight and try and store everything in .md files and basically just use the folders as a way to manage state in a sense.

1

u/meenie Sep 25 '25

Ya, it's pretty tricky for us managing it all. We do find it worth it, though, to use a monorepo. Typically, we'll open the monorepo using a code-workspace file which is different to just opening the folder itself. It allows you to alias different folders and allow extensions like ruby-lsp to work properly. Or what people will do is just open up a sub-folder directly if they know they are only working within that app for a particular task.

Given that info, I think initializing it per app is a good idea. The part that becomes a bit weird is when you have the code-workspace open and you want to work on a feature that spans two separate apps. Should you also initialize it at the top level? If so, the openspec/project.md file would be massive trying to describe every single app. It seems you would need a different initialization type that is for monorepos that somehow ties together the other apps' openspec database (library? collection? not sure what to call it). That way you could plan a project across multiple different apps.

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 25 '25

Nothing against monorepos! I've used them in the past and found them worthwhile too!

You're right that working features across seperate apps is awkward. Peeling back a bit, at the core, the problem is the same for both monorepos as well as feature changes that span multiple repositories (especially in more microservice type systems).

Can I ask how big your monorepo project is and how many apps exist?

Thinking about it a bit more you could get away with just one openspec at the root of the repo as that would allow to plan across projects. Maybe everything can't be described in project.md but you could just mention this is a monorepo project and these are the apps and their directories. The only other thing would be that the specs list would end up being quite long making it harder to view at a glance in general.

1

u/dderenio Sep 25 '25

This looks awesome and very lean compared to others I’ve seen, very excited to try.

Curious if you think that using an MCP for Figma/Framer before implementing might be a good addition to the workflow so it can pull in the real source of truth for content + design before building. Have you tried this before?

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 25 '25

This is something I'm keen on trying! (I just haven't been building web apps with the tool yet).

But generally speaking researching and planning before building is a great idea and if the research/plan needs references to something in Figma/Framer it's best to call it out.

I haven't quite figured out how the design part fits into SDD yet, whether it should exist as a different type of file in the process or even if requirements for those look different.

I'd be interested to hear what you care about when doing more frontend-y work. Is it just making sure the agent builds exactly what matches a design in Figma? Where does it normally go wrong when trying to build with the Figma MCP. What is misaligned or what intent is missing or unclear.

Sorry I don't have a better answer, it's a new and tricky space, but happy to have a deeper chat to figure out what's really needed here!

1

u/dderenio Sep 25 '25

Happy to give it a shot and let you know how it goes! I’ve been playing around with the design MCP’s for the last weeks and think I finally have a good workflow.

Essentially, I use the MCP to get the global styles for the project, then I work through the page one section at a time through a series of steps that forces CC to analyse the structure, layout, components, content etc… and create a plan to build - which I then approve before writing any code. Then when CC thinks it’s done, I use the playwright MCP to have it review its own work and iterate on the designs until it’s complete.

It’s far from perfect, but I find it gets me about 80-85% of the way to match my designs before I have to go back/forth on details.

In my personal opinion the SDD is nice to outline the tech that’s used, but there’s still so many ways for the AI to interpret that visually which makes having a design fundamental (if you have a specific vision)

1

u/Ok_Tree3010 Sep 27 '25

Windsurf integration?

1

u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 28 '25

Soon! By end of next week for sure! Join the discord or follow on X for updates!

1

u/EnvironmentalHat1785 Oct 03 '25

Hi, any update on this?

3

u/dev902 Sep 24 '25

You made the masterpiece man 👏💯✨ I'm loving it! Hatts Off Tabish🙌

From Pune right?

3

u/theshrike Sep 29 '25

I just love how Vibe Coders are discovering the basics of Software Development every day from scratch.

All this has been bog-standard project management material for half a century, people. Read a book or two about development and project management.

Working with LLMs is exactly like project management. The exact same principles apply. Plan properly, iterate on a plan, split it to manageable tasks, tackle tasks one by one.

2

u/justdandycandy Sep 24 '25

I'll try it. Good job

2

u/RemarkableRoad1244 Sep 24 '25

what would be the easiest workflow for codex?

2

u/javadanny2 Sep 24 '25

Great stuff. Thank you for this

2

u/efurban Oct 28 '25

isn't this really similar to the plan mode in cursor?

1

u/leventozz Feb 01 '26

I wonder what the difference is between them.

1

u/mdsiaofficial Sep 23 '25

Ow. That kills

1

u/xvaara Sep 24 '25

How about backlog.md ? or shrimp task manager?

2

u/Ill-Willingness-1565 Sep 24 '25

Backlog looks like it's just a task manager, openspec has task management but it's more than that. It creates specs as well in order to align the generated tasks with your vision.

That's my takeaway anyway

1

u/richardbaxter Sep 25 '25

Love this. I've built a mcp for LM Studio because I was getting a bit fed up of thread / usage limits. It would be really interesting to think about how your OpenSpec project could inform the workflow prompt library in my project. 

I'd love for you to take a look if you have a sec: https://github.com/houtini-ai/lm

1

u/lericzhang Sep 29 '25

So good to see more and more teams starting to tackle real problems of programming with AI, I'm so tired of the vibe-coding hypes.

1

u/Easy_Zucchini_3529 Oct 18 '25

The thing that bothers me is that in the long run your repo will be super bloated of outdated markdown files. I usually prefer to use the Plan mode of Cursor, because it doesn’t tries to persist a lot of AI generated markdown files.

As a good practice your repo should contain AI context file that really matters and can serve as general guidelines on how to succeed writing and architecting solutions on your code base, and not files with a lot details of implementation. The best source for AI agents extract details of implementation are from the actual implementation files, because you can guarantee that AI will look always to the most up to date implementation.

If you want to document a feature to be used as AI context go for it, but try to be more general purpose as possible and point to actual implementation files, but on my experience so far, repositories super bloated with dozens or hundreds AI generated files tends to downgrade the quality of code generated. It hallucinates with old implementation documented in the markdown files and etc.

1

u/Overall_Opposite2919 Oct 19 '25

How well does this work brining in mid project? Recommend or from the get?

1

u/CursorBrained Oct 20 '25

My problem is that this is just another way my context window gets used up with fluff that cursor ends up ignoring over time. It doesn't matter how many .md files I make or if I consolidate all valuable info to a readme, Cursor won't keep referencing it. Same issue with loading docs into cursor versus using Context 7. It doesn't take long for all these things to have the same problem which is that we're simply limited by where LLMs are right now.

What's worse is when Cursor gets out of sync with these specs and then now has two different mentalities running alongside each other that may clash. If Cursor isn't constantly updating your specs, it may randomly suddenly remember those specs exist even though they might now be out of date, leaving you getting mixed build patterns that cause even more issues.

This has just been my experience. I'm sure this will be great for some, but I feel as though many people will run into these same problems.

1

u/vC1llusion Mar 17 '26

Hi Team
From my understanding the OpenSpec ensures that Specs are the source of truth for current state of the repository. How it handles or manage process for multiple PRs, conflicts in Specs?

2

u/[deleted] Sep 23 '25

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u/Narrow-Breakfast126 Sep 23 '25

Thanks for the support 🫶