Is SpecKit *really* maintained?

[massimogentilini]

With the new year coming and Den that left Microsoft to join Anthropic I'm a little worried about how the project is (NOT) progressing.

In the last month we had 22 PRs opened and exactly zero commits and the more time passes the more difficult it would be to merge everything on a new version.

Can someone from GH or Microsoft take care of managing this code base or comment if SpecKit as a tool is being abandoned in favour of adding it as a first class feature to VSCode or GitHub Copilot (totally reasonable from my point of view)?

Has some of you connection with GH or MS teams that can get in touch and elicit their point of view?

I feel that SpecKit and the way of working it impose on a project are a real game changer for any organization wanting to leverage coding agents in a proper manner, but if SpecKit is not maintained properly than I need to move on some different tooling for SDD, I really did not liked BMAD but I can change idea, if needed.

From my point of view SpecKit as a first class citizen of Copilot would be good, but I can understand that there are a lot of people using different assistants and having something generic is a strong motivation to progress the tool, but we need momentum to keep working successfully with SpecKit.

[crisweber2600]

@jflam do you have any thoughts about this?

[smith153]

There are newer tools coming up. I'm currently looking into https://github.com/obra/superpowers

[massimogentilini]

Seems to be that it does not support GitHub Copilot but other tools, correct?

[TabishB]

Hey all, I'm the maintainer of OpenSpec! It's a little sad to see this project wane, especially one that's open-source.

I was very keen to see where a project with a big backing like Microsoft could really take this space as I think with coding agents evolving, the usage of specs is becoming more and more important.

While we're not as big as Microsoft and we're not a 1:1 of spec-kit feature wise, we are relatively popular in the space at 18K+ stars and house a lot of extremely happy spec-kit users who have moved over.

We're also not sitting still, we're trying a lot of new things and we're constantly trying to figure out better experiences for users.

Check out some of the fun things we're trying here: https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/blob/main/docs/experimental-workflow.md

Everything in the above doc is a direct result of months and months of community feedback.

While we can't promise everything will be the same as spec-kit, we think you might still have a fun time :)

[re-ava]

I have largely been happy with OpenSpec. It has helped my team accelerate.

[harikrishnan83]

I have been using OpenSpec for over 4 months now and I would recommend it.

I have also documented some of my learnings on the same.

1. I personally like their top level "source of truth" spec
2. I have used it for both small projects and larger team setups where I have also experimented integrating with product backlogs like Linear and Jira
3. It works quite well with existing codebase also

In general iteration cycles are much faster in OpenSpec. For context, I have also used Spec-Kit extensively so this comparison is based on hands-on experience with both.

[massimogentilini]

Will check it for sure.

[hillsmao]

The OpenSpec development framework is absolutely elegant! I’ve successfully built multiple projects with it. It’s document-driven and not complicated at all — perfect for non-technical product managers like me!

[atman-33]

I also use OpenSpec all the time. Thank you.

[TyrelCB]

Spec Kit was dead to me after: 1) Not delivering a functional feature - nice spec though!! 2) Using all my premium tokens - 5x token usage over a vibe code that just worked 3) plan mode with claude code came out