Artifact: constitution

Spec Kit’s signature artifact — .specify/memory/constitution.md, a set of immutable, project-wide governing principles written once and treated as “the architectural DNA of the system.” Structured as numbered articles:

• Articles I–III — universal: library-first design, CLI interfaces, test-driven development.
• Articles IV–VI — project-defined: teams encode domain-specific governance.
• Articles VII–IX — simplicity, anti-abstraction, and integration-first testing.

What makes it distinctive is not having principles — every framework here has opinions — but externalizing them into one durable, versioned document that later phases are mechanically gated against. speckit-plan validates its technology choices against the constitution through “Phase -1” gates (enforcing simplicity ≤3 projects, framework-direct usage, integration-first tests), and speckit-analyze audits every artifact for constitutional compliance. GSD, Matt Pocock, and Addy instead embed principles inside individual skills; OpenSpec has no equivalent.

Unlike a per-change spec/plan, the constitution is not consumed and discarded — it persists across all features and is updated only deliberately (via speckit-constitution).

Produced by (backlinks)

• speckit-constitution — creates and updates it.

See Also

• pattern-project-constitution — the technique this artifact realizes.
• speckit-analyze — the gate that enforces it across all planning artifacts.
• artifact-adr — a narrower, per-decision governance record (Addy/MP), versus this project-wide charter.
• stage-align — the stage this artifact supports.