Spec Driven Development — Chapter 09: 4 - speckit constitution: the rules before the first move

1. Pre-Reading Briefing

Core Question: Why does spec-kit ask for project-wide rules before the first feature spec, and how should those rules be chosen and checked?
Key Points to Watch For:
- Track the boundary between a lasting project rule, a feature's behavior, and a technology choice. Where would each belong in the workflow?
- Notice how the author turns a broad preference into a rule that someone can apply and defend. Pay attention to the reason given for each rule.
- Read the To-Do example critically: which rules serve a small personal app, and which might be more structure than it needs?
- See how the generated constitution is reviewed, corrected, and changed over time. What would make you reject its first draft?
- Examine the advice to clear chat context between steps. What information must the written artifacts preserve for the next step to work?
Context & Thread from Prior Chapters: Chapter 8 ended with an initialized project and an empty constitution file; no feature exists yet. Chapter 7 defined a spec by the usable action it delivers. This chapter asks what rules should apply to every such feature, even when the implementation work begins in a particular layer.

Pending reading.

Pending post-reading review.