OpenJCockpit

Specification-driven development

OpenJCockpit treats a specification as an executable contract: a feature is specified, with requirements and acceptance criteria, before an agent plans or implements it. Specs live as Markdown in the project’s Git repository, so they are versioned, reviewable and shared by humans and agents alike.

There are two related layers:

Specs in your project repositories: the specs the dashboard lists for a project, created and consumed by the default workflows.
The spec-driven workflow for OpenJCockpit’s own agentic development: the folder rules and templates in services/embabel-agent-service/.

Specs in your project repositories

flowchart LR
    I["Idea or requirement"] --> C["Create spec from prompt<br/>(Business Analyst)"]
    C --> S["Spec in specs/<br/>reviewed and merged"]
    S --> W["Implement / Realise spec<br/>(agent chain)"]
    W --> B["Reviewable branch<br/>with checkpoints"]
    B --> R["Human review<br/>and pull request"]

Spec-init and create flows in the dashboard

Without specs, the dashboard shows one of two flows depending on the repository state:

No .specify folder on the base branch → the spec-init flow: a starter template is offered as a pull request (or the link to an already open spec-init branch).
A .specify folder exists, but no specs yet in specs/ → the pull-request flow is skipped and the dashboard shows the ✨ Create spec with prompt button, which starts the Create spec from prompt (RAG) workflow via the prompt dialog. The status endpoint (GET /api/projects/{id}/spec-init/status) reports this via the templateExists field.

The starter spec template that ai-control-service pushes is services/ai-control-service/src/main/resources/spec-workflow/spec-template.md. Once specs exist, select one in the dashboard and start a workflow on it; the selected spec’s content is passed to the agents as workflow input. See Agents and workflows.

A local example spec repository with two fictional customers is mounted read-only into ai-control-service from infrastructure/spec-repository-stub/ (SPEC_REPOSITORY_PATH).

Spec-driven workflow for OpenJCockpit’s agentic development

All agentic AI feature work follows a spec-driven workflow. The structure, templates, and rules live in services/embabel-agent-service/ (see also services/embabel-agent-service/AGENTS.md).

Initialize the spec workflow

The structure is automatically created and validated on startup of the embabel-agent-service (SpecWorkflowInitializer, can be disabled with SPEC_WORKFLOW_INIT_ENABLED=false). The same validation runs as a JUnit test on every build:

mvn -pl services/embabel-agent-service test

Spec folder rules

Every feature must have its own folder under specs/.
The folder name must match NNN-feature-slug.
Every feature folder must contain spec.md, plan.md, tasks.md, and review.md.
The only Markdown file allowed directly in specs/ is _index.md.
Flat spec files are forbidden.

Templates for new features are located in services/embabel-agent-service/templates/specs/. Copy them to specs/NNN-feature-slug/ and update specs/_index.md. An example feature is specs/001-example-feature/.

Human approval rules for agents

AGENTS.md requires an agent to stop and ask for human approval when, among other things, a spec declares personal data together with a public-cloud LLM strategy, contains secrets, requires a DPIA, or when the task mutates customer data, sends external messages, or changes authentication, authorization, logging, retention or data exports. Agents must not send secrets, credentials, tokens, production data, special category data or raw personal data to public LLMs. See the full list in AGENTS.md.

These are rules for agents working under that workflow. Runtime enforcement in the platform comes from OPA policies, tool allowlists, guardrails and approval gates; see Policy enforcement.

Verification commands

Backend and frontend verification commands are listed in Local development.

Agents and workflows
Spec queue: run specs one after another per project.
Git integration

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