Spec Kitty

Quickstart: Specify Brief Intake Mode

The problem this solves

You have a plan document — from Claude Code plan mode, Cursor, Codex, a Linear ticket, or just a Markdown file you wrote. Without this feature, /spec-kitty.specify ignores it and asks discovery questions the plan already answers. With this feature, you hand the plan to Spec Kitty and get a spec in minutes.

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Workflow: plan document → spec

# 1. You have a plan document
cat PLAN.md

# 2. Ingest it
spec-kitty intake PLAN.md

# Output:
#   ✓ Brief written to .kittify/mission-brief.md
#   ✓ Provenance written to .kittify/brief-source.yaml

# 3. Run specify — brief is detected automatically
/spec-kitty.specify

# Agent output:
#   BRIEF DETECTED: .kittify/mission-brief.md (source: PLAN.md)
#   Reading brief...
#   [one-paragraph summary]
#   [0–2 gap-filling questions, or none]
#   [extracted FR/NFR/C set for confirmation]
#   → spec.md written and committed
#   → brief files deleted

Stdin / piped input

# Pipe from any source
cat PLAN.md | spec-kitty intake -
echo "Build a login page with email + password" | spec-kitty intake -
pbpaste | spec-kitty intake -      # macOS clipboard

Inspect the current brief

spec-kitty intake --show
# Prints: brief content + source_file, ingested_at, brief_hash

Overwrite an existing brief

spec-kitty intake REVISED_PLAN.md --force

Tracker ticket flow (no change needed)

If you created the mission with mission create --from-ticket, the ticket context file is already in place. Just run /spec-kitty.specify — it detects ticket-context.md automatically (priority 2 behind mission-brief.md).

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What the brief files look like

.kittify/mission-brief.md:

<!-- spec-kitty intake: ingested from PLAN.md at 2026-04-20T07:47:00+00:00 -->
<!-- brief_hash: a3f8c2d1... -->

# My Plan

[your plan content verbatim]

.kittify/brief-source.yaml:

source_file: PLAN.md
ingested_at: "2026-04-20T07:47:00+00:00"
brief_hash: "a3f8c2d1..."

Both files are gitignored. They exist only until /spec-kitty.specify commits spec.md, then they are deleted.

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Brief quality and discovery questions

Your plan contains	Questions asked
Objective + constraints + approach + acceptance criteria	0–1
Objective + constraints, no acceptance criteria	2–3
Goal statement only	4–5
Nothing (no brief file)	Full discovery interview (current behaviour)

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The spec-kitty plan command is unchanged

spec-kitty intake is a separate root-level command. spec-kitty plan (which scaffolds plan.md) is untouched.