Artifact: proposal.md

openspec/changes/<name>/proposal.md — the why and what of a change. It captures the problem statement, the scope boundaries (what is in and out of scope), and the proposed technical approach at a high level. It is the first artifact in a change’s dependency chain (proposal → specs → design → tasks) and the intent that the spec deltas, design, and tasks then flesh out.

OpenSpec deliberately splits apart what other frameworks bundle into one spec document: the why/scope lives here in proposal.md, the behavioral requirements live in the artifact-spec-delta, the how lives in artifact-design-md, and the task list lives in artifact-plan-md (tasks.md). So proposal.md is the rationale layer only — narrower than a full artifact-prd or artifact-spec-md, which fold requirements and scope into a single file.

Produced by (backlinks)

• openspec-propose — authors it as the first of the four planning artifacts.

See Also

• artifact-spec-delta — the behavioral requirements this proposal frames.
• artifact-design-md · artifact-plan-md — the how and the task list that follow it.
• artifact-prd · artifact-spec-md — single-document spec counterparts from other frameworks.
• artifact-product-brief — BMAD’s comparable pre-PRD why/what + scope scoping document.
• stage-specify — the stage that produces it.