spec artifact

A chat transcript is not a specification. It is a record of a negotiation, full of abandoned ideas, corrections and things that were true two messages ago. Generating code directly from one means re-deriving intent from scratch on every turn, and re-deriving it slightly differently each time.

A spec artifact is what you get when that conversation is compiled into something structured: the entities and their fields, the routes and screens, the roles, the integrations, and — usefully — the explicit non-goals. It is versioned alongside the code, so any build can be traced back to the description that produced it.

The distinction from a traditional specification is who writes it and when. Nobody fills in a form. The artifact is derived from what was said, updated every turn, and shown to you only if you want to see it. Most people never will, in the same way most people never look at a lockfile.

It is worth being clear that this is an implementation concern rather than a product claim. From the outside, a tool with a spec artifact and one without look identical — you type into a box, an app appears. The difference shows up in whether the twentieth change still respects the third one.