🤔 How are people managing spec relationships as projects scale?

[kennedy-whytech]

I’ve been using spec-kit more heavily, and I’m starting to hit an issue as the number of specs grows:

It’s getting harder to keep specs connected and in sync as new features are introduced.

A few things I’m noticing:

• Specs tend to become isolated over time
• Naming can drift (e.g. “Auth” vs “Authentication” vs “Login”)
• Relationships between features (dependencies, shared concepts) aren’t always captured
• Older specs don’t get updated when new features affect them

Right now, spec generation works great—but maintaining relationships between specs feels much more manual- no matter to Human or Robot

Curious how others are handling this:

• Do you maintain some kind of canonical naming / registry?
• How do you keep specs from becoming outdated or disconnected? periodic scanning/auditing?
• Do you link specs together (manually or via tooling)?
• Has anyone tried using something like Obsidian (or similar tools) to visualize relationships between specs?
• Or do you treat specs as more “one-time artifacts” rather than something that evolves?

Context

I’ve been exploring ideas like:

• linking specs together (dependencies, related features, etc.)
• keeping naming consistent across a growing system
• using graph-style visualization (e.g. Obsidian) to better understand how features connect

But I’m not sure what the “right” pattern is yet.

Would love to hear how others are approaching this as their spec count grows.

[mnriem]

Archive extension would be one way of looking at it. Another way could be to write a spec that takes say the first 10 specs and creates documentation out of it and then deletes those specs themselves and you have Spec Kit work through that. Or create your own extension! Would love to hear what you decide to do and if you end up doing your own extension, preset or worfklow please do share!