What are people using for this nowadays?

There seems to be a spectrum from fluid, iterative workflows like OpenSpec to more up-front alignment and control like Matt Pocock skills.

Curious what people have settled on.

I settled on lat.md [1] at the beginning of this year and never looked back.

Its design offers a compellingly simple surface for weaving natural-language intent into the codebase itself, without overcomplicating things:

---

Key Ideas

* Plain markdown: readable by humans, parseable by agents

* Wiki links connect concepts into a navigable graph

* // @lat: and # @lat: comments tie source code to specs

* lat check ensures nothing drifts out of sync

* lat search for semantic vector search across all sections

---

For me it strikes the right balance between structure and flexibility. It gives agents enough context-efficient grounding to reduce functional and architectural drift [2], while remaining malleable enough to evolve with new requirements.

Admittedly I haven't run any evals, and I'm sure there are even better systems out there... but if I still had the problem I was trying to solve when I found it, I wouldn't be talking about it right now.

Of course it's likely that my problem has only migrated to a higher order of complexity, but surfacing it again through building increasingly complex things is an interesting enough challenge in itself.

[1] https://github.com/vercel-labs/lat.md

[2] 100% auto-eliminating drift is an unrealistic goal -- that's where you come in.

Symlink the global MD files to a single file I control that is versioned. Define my own general spec and workflow terminology using markdown files in this universal MD.

```

~/.config/opencode/AGENTS.md

~/.claude/CLAUDE.md

~/.codex/AGENTS.md

~/.copilot/copilot-instructions.md

~/.gemini/GEMINI.md

```

Define it as a graph and iterate. I use more tokens, but I can also use more tools without disruption. Delegating markdown to folders/smaller repos can solve the tokens/context issue.

[dead]