Use with Claude Code

This section is an adoption guide. It teaches you how to drive spec-spine with Claude Code using a ready-made kit: a complete set of skills, agents, and rules that chain into a single governed development loop.

The kit lives in this repository under kit/. It is Apache-2.0, substrate-agnostic, and built to be copied into any repository that adopts spec-spine. These pages explain what each piece does and how to adapt it; the files themselves are in kit/.claude/.

What you are adopting

On top of the spec-spine substrate, the kit adds:

• 10 skills that cover the development lifecycle: session init, planning, implementation, validation, adversarial review, conventional commits, and gated PR creation.
• 4 agents for the plan / explore / implement / review cycle.
• 3 rules that constrain how every workflow reads artifacts and resolves spec/code disagreement (the same floor spec-spine init scaffolds).
• Config templates: AGENTS.md, settings.json (hooks), .mcp.json.

The kit is not a monolith. Every piece carries a portability verdict so you know what to copy as-is, what to adapt, and what is an example of a pattern you recreate for your own stack.

Why spec-spine is the substrate

spec-spine is a typed, hash-verifiable authority ledger over a markdown spec corpus. It gives the kit three things to build on:

1. The compiler turns specs/NNN-slug/spec.md files into a governed registry of authority relationships.
2. The indexer produces a structural view of the codebase with per-shard staleness detection driven by content hashing.
3. The coupling gate refuses code that drifts from its owning spec at PR time.

Several skills (/init, /setup, /ship) depend directly on the spec-spine CLI and its governed-read discipline. The three rules are scaffolded by spec-spine init, so installing spec-spine gives you the rule floor for free.

Portability taxonomy

Every skill, agent, and rule carries one of three verdicts:

Verdict	Meaning	Action
Portable	Works in any repository without modification	Copy as-is
Adaptable	Needs light configuration (a build command, a path)	Copy and edit
Project-Specific	Wired to one stack (a framework, a service, specific spec IDs)	Skip, or replace with your equivalent

The kit ships only the Portable and Adaptable pieces. The Project-Specific examples from the upstream source (a framework specialist agent, paths-scoped service rules, a post-merge PR flow) are documented as patterns to recreate, not shipped. See Adopt in your repo.

Next step

Continue to Install the kit.