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Pattern: Project constitution (externalized governing principles)

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Codify a project’s immutable, cross-cutting principles into one durable, versioned document — a “constitution” — and mechanically gate every downstream artifact against it. The constitution is authored up front, persists across all features, and is the fixed reference that plans and analyses must satisfy.

Three coupled moves:

  1. Externalize. Principles live in a single named artifact (artifact-constitution, .specify/memory/constitution.md) organized as numbered “articles,” not scattered as prose inside individual skills or prompts.
  2. Make it governing law. Later phases don’t merely consult the principles — they are gated against them. Spec Kit’s speckit-plan runs “Phase -1” constitutional gates; speckit-analyze audits every artifact for compliance and requires justified exceptions.
  3. Keep it immutable-by-default. Unlike a per-change spec, the constitution is not consumed and rewritten each feature; it changes only through deliberate amendment.

Why it’s distinctive

This is the axis on which Spec Kit differs from the other frameworks. GSD, Matt Pocock, and Addy all have strong principles — but they embed them inside individual skills (Addy’s per-skill “Red Flags,” MP’s design heuristics), applied at the point of use. OpenSpec has no project-wide charter at all. Only Spec Kit lifts the principles out into one governing document that acts as a compliance gate — the same “externalize the rules” move that a linter config or an ADR log makes, applied to whole-project architecture.

Contrast with pattern-anti-rationalization (Addy): both are guardrail mechanisms, but anti-rationalization pre-empts excuses within a skill, whereas a constitution asserts positive project-wide law checked across artifacts.

Spec Kit:

pstack — the closest relative to a constitution that is not a document:

  • pstack-poteto-mode — carries 23 principles as an inline index over 23 individually-loadable leaf skills, grouped Core / Architecture / Verification / Delegation / Meta. The binding rule is a citation requirement rather than a gate: name each principle that shaped a decision and the specific choice it changed, and cite only principles whose leaf SKILL.md you read this session. Where speckit’s constitution is one immutable document that gates every plan, pstack’s is a navigable corpus loaded on demand and audited through the reply.

Tessl — a mandated capability set rather than a document:

  • tessl-workspace — required skills plus install and publish policies push a standard into every workspace from outside the framework, enforced by the index rather than by a framework’s own analysis step. Recorded here rather than as evidence for the parked stage-govern split, which asks for a framework gating project principles.

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