If you like this / SDD, I'd appreciate your feedback:
https://github.com/spekk-ai/spekk-cli
Similar iterative specs philosophy. Ours is a bit different because we focus on declarative specs and installable agent skills. We chose Go for simplicity and minimal requirements (single binary).
Ive wondered if I have too much complexity, and from time to time I do a "prompt astrology reset" where I get rid of all the extra cruft. I can't go without the spec sheets though.
On removing cruft: one of the key features of spekk is an "observer" agent role that is tasked with finding drift. On a production codebase, I run this daily in a sandbox. It pulls the latest changes and looks for specs that are mismatched from the implementation, preferring to look at specs and code that changed recently and prioritizing "major" drift events. The observer agent then opens a PR wkth its observations (markdown with YAML like the specs). It also posts a summary to Slack, but that's optional. The sandbox agent code is part of the spekk-cli codebase.
You say this is your first time seeing openspec, but you've been working on a pretty similar project for a year now. Openspec and Speckit both seem to have similar (almost same?) goal as yours. Do you just jump into such a project as yours without worrying about others already existing?
I tend to overthink such stuff...
The existence of similar tools has certainly given me pause several times. I was aware of SpecKit (GitHub) and Kiro (Amazon) when I started in January of this year. I Googled around and asked AI to find and evaluate similar things to my idea. Somehow I genuinely missed openspec, which seems to have had 20k GitHub stars at that time. I look at this and realize how bad I've been about sharing and promoting spekk.
I've continued to iterate on my idea because nobody else is as focused on the concept of declarative, living specifications that evolve with the code. From the beginning that has been Spekk's differentiator.
I've definitely had doubts about whether building my own version is "worth it."
Some wisdom I've gained as I get older is that the world is a complex place. There are many valid ways to solve the same problem, and every version has its audience and community.
The other thing is that even in this age of AI, putting sustained effort into a thing is still a scarce resource. The best software still takes time to mature and refine. It never ceases to amaze me how many small but important decisions and features go into what many see as "just markdown files and skills."
Appreciate the question.
FWIW, there are about ten people using Spekk at my agency daily. The standardization across people and projects is helpful to us. It's built for teams like us, not just me. There are definitely some features that took us a few weeks to months to get right, even AI assisted, and I think that has value whether you use our tool or ask your AI to copy parts of it.
We're a small team though, so your point still stands.