| name | spec-to-code-compliance |
| description | Check code against the documentation that specifies it - which requirements hold, which the code contradicts, which are absent, and what the code does that no document mentions. Use when comparing an implementation against a whitepaper, protocol spec, or design document. |
| allowed-tools | Workflow Task Read Grep Glob |
Spec-to-Code Compliance
Two artifacts disagree, and the job is to find where. The documentation says what the system does; the code
decides what it actually does. Every gap between them is either a bug or a documentation fix, and which one it
is is the finding.
When to Use
You have both documentation describing intended behavior and the code that should implement it. A whitepaper
against a protocol, a design note against a service, a README's stated guarantees against the functions behind
them.
Most useful when the document is authoritative — something a client wrote, published, or is audited against —
because then a divergence is a defect rather than stale prose.
When NOT to Use
Not for code with no documentation of intended behavior. There is nothing to check against, and a requirement
inferred from the code is checked against itself. Build the system model first with audit-context-building.
Not for finding bugs in general. This finds one class: where the code and the document disagree. A bug both
artifacts are silent about is out of scope, and a bug the document endorses is a finding against the document.
Not for writing or improving documentation, though it produces the list of what needs fixing.
Do not check requirements in this context
Run /spec-to-code-compliance:spec-compliance <path>. The slash command takes a path; to name the
specification directly or widen the fan-out, ask for the run with those values — "run spec-compliance on
./contracts against SPEC.md, checking 20 requirements" — and they reach the script as {path, spec, limit}.
Typing the object literally after the slash command does not work; it arrives as a string and becomes the path.
It finds the documents, splits them into individually checkable requirements, gives each requirement its own
agent to hunt the code with, has independent agents try to refute every divergence before it is reported, and
writes spec-compliance/REPORT.md plus one file per requirement under spec-compliance/requirements/. Only
compact records come back here.
For a single requirement, dispatch the spec-to-code-compliance:spec-compliance-checker agent at it.
This is not a preference about where output lands. The check does not fit in one context window if it is done
honestly: judging one requirement means reading the enforcement, its callees, and its callers, and doing that
for thirty requirements means holding thirty call chains at once. Attempted inline, the first few get a real
check and the rest get a plausible one — and the transcript looks the same either way, because a verdict resting
on a promising function name reads exactly like one resting on having read the function. Per requirement, in its
own context, is what makes that difference visible.
Two properties come from the script rather than from instructions, and cannot be had here:
- A refutation the finding's author did not perform. Claude favors findings it produced when asked to check
them. The workflow sends each divergence to agents that did not produce it — one reading the code again, one
re-reading the document — and drops what either knocks down.
- Records that cannot be prose. A subagent bound to a return schema has to name the lines it read and the
searches it ran. An
absent verdict arrives with the patterns tried and their results attached, which is the
only thing separating a real absence from a search that stopped early.
Measured on the routes-not-inline eval: with this plugin installed the work is dispatched every run, without
it never — Δ +1.00. Deleting this section while leaving the workflow in place changes nothing, because the
workflow is a real command that gets found and dispatched on its own. Read that as the mechanism carrying the
behavior rather than this text: the section is here so a human knows what runs and why, not because the routing
depends on it.
What comes back, and how to read it
Every requirement gets one of six verdicts: implemented, partial, contradicted, stronger-than-spec,
absent, or undecidable. The interesting ones are the middle four.
partial is usually the most serious thing in the report. The requirement holds on the paths anyone would
test and fails on one nobody did, which is how it survived long enough to be found.absent rests entirely on its searched record. Read it. Enforcement often lives somewhere the search
did not go — a modifier, a base class, a caller that checks first.undecidable, and any documentProblem, are findings about the documentation. A requirement too vague to
check is one the client cannot hold anyone to.stronger-than-spec is an undocumented constraint. It works today, and nothing tells the next person
changing that code that anything depended on it.
The report also carries the reverse direction — behavior the code has that no document mentions — which the
per-requirement pass cannot find by construction, since it is driven by the documents.
Read notChecked, unverified, and unreadableDocuments before treating the report as complete. Requirements
below the fan-out cut were never checked, and a divergence whose refutation agents both failed is unverified
rather than confirmed.
Judgment the workflow does not make for you
Severity is consequence, not distance from the text: DIVERGENCE_RUBRIC.md. A
rounding step that bleeds a pool outranks a MUST satisfied by different means than the document describes, and
documentation drift with no behavioral consequence is a docs ticket.
The verdict is not the finding. absent on a mandatory requirement is a finding; absent on a sentence
describing a roadmap item is not. Deciding which is which is what this skill is for, and the workflow hands you
the evidence to decide it with.
The target does not have to be a contract
The question is the same everywhere — what does this requirement demand, where would it be enforced, is it
enforced on every path — but what counts as a specification and where enforcement hides both change.
DOMAIN_NOTES.md maps that across contracts, C and C++, services, and decompiled
firmware, and covers the case where the specification is an RFC or a standard rather than a project document.
Read it when the target is not a contract, and when scoping a check against a large standard.
Reference
- ANALYSIS_FORMAT.md — the on-disk format for a per-requirement analysis. Read
when extending this plugin or judging whether a record is trustworthy.
- WORKED_EXAMPLE.md — three requirements chased to a verdict, one per verdict
that is easy to get wrong: arithmetic that satisfies a requirement it does not resemble, an absence whose
searches are the finding, and enforcement present on every path but the one nobody tested.
- DOMAIN_NOTES.md — per-domain mapping of specifications and enforcement.
- DIVERGENCE_RUBRIC.md — severity, and the two directions of a gap.
