Spec Before You Ship
An OpenSpec Tutorial

SpecBefore You Ship.

You've tried building with AI. Sometimes it goes well. Often it doesn't — the code drifts, you spend more time correcting than building, and you're not sure why. This tutorial teaches you one habit that fixes most of that: write a spec before you start.

Start with Lesson 01 →
8 lessonsSelf-pacedFree
Who this is for

For developers who've used AI to write code and kept hitting the same wall — the AI goes sideways, corrections spiral, and you end up worse off than when you started. You haven't found a workflow that actually helps yet. This tutorial is that workflow.

Curriculum
  1. 01
    The Chaos Tax
    Why AI coding goes sideways — and the one habit that fixes it.
    →
  2. 02
    Install & Init
    Install OpenSpec and initialize your project in two commands.
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  3. 03
    The Exploration
    Think deeply before you write. Use exploration mode to crystallize ideas.
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  4. 04
    The Proposal
    One sentence becomes a scoped, structured description of the work.
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  5. 05
    The Spec
    Turn silent AI guesses into explicit, written decisions.
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  6. 06
    The Design Doc
    Document how it gets built before the AI writes a line.
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  7. 07
    Tasks
    Break the design into tasks and hand them to the AI.
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  8. 08
    Ship It
    Archive the change and carry the pattern into everything you build next.
    →
"The constraint isn't the AI. It's the clarity of what you asked for."
— The premise behind every lesson in this tutorial