Start light
You don't adopt all of Specline at once, but there are no tiers to pick between — it's one system throughout. Adopt Part 1, then Part 2; Part 3 isn't a further stage, it's a switch.
| Part | What it adds | When |
|---|---|---|
| Part 1 — writing a spec | One spec, in the Specline shape, in docs/drafts/ or docs/specs/, with integrity checks enabled. An afternoon, to feel whether the structure helps before committing. | Trying it |
| Part 2 — keeping the record | The four-folder lifecycle, the decider's go in git, building, review, graduation, archive/ and knowledge/. The whole methodology for a single stream of work. | Start here |
| Part 3 — unattended builds (experimental) | Parallel-work governance — staleness timers, the decider budget, the coupling ceiling. For running many builds nobody is watching, at once. | Later, if ever |
Parts 1 and 2 are where almost everyone lives. It's the full shape-approve-build-review-graduate loop, and it's enough to hand an agent a feature and trust what comes back. Part 3 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. It's off by default; flipunattended: true in specline.yml when you actually run builds nobody is watching.
If a Part-3 rule isn't earning its keep, leave the switch off. 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 tune what Specline enforces and flip the unattended switch.