Start light
You don't adopt all of Specline at once. You pick a tier, and Specline enforces only the tier you declare — so you get the value of the parts you need without paying for the governance you don't. For one person planning features, that's almost always the loop and nothing more.
| Tier | What it adds | When |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 0 | One spec, in the Specline shape. An afternoon, to feel whether the structure helps before committing. | Trying it |
| Tier 1 | The loop — the folder shape, shaping, the ratify gate, building, review, graduation. The whole methodology for a single stream of work. | Start here |
| Tier 2 | Parallel-work governance — staleness timers, the decider budget, the coupling ceiling. For running many features and agents at once. | Later, if ever |
Tier 1 is where almost everyone lives. It's the full shape-ratify-build-review-graduate loop, and it's enough to hand an agent a feature and trust what comes back. Tier 2 only starts earning its keep when you have enough features and agents in flight that you need to govern which work happens and how the queue is bounded — concerns that are pure noise for a solo planner with one feature at a time.
If a rule isn't earning its keep, you're at the wrong tier. That's a setting to change, not a failure to push through.
How you actually start
The setup is almost nothing. Drop the brief into your repo, open a fresh chat, and say "let's shape a feature." The agent pulls the methodology itself, runs the moves from chapter 6, and checks its own work with Specline as it goes. You bring the product judgment; it brings the shape. From there, the rest of the handbook is just what happens next.
Reference: getting set up and the repo configuration — where you declare your tier and tune what Specline enforces.