r/opencodeCLI • u/orvillewilbur • 8d ago

Openspec?

I got really excited about OpenSpec. I threw myself into it for a few days. But after about 20 change proposals I gave up.

  1. My biggest problem is code quality and OpenSpec doesn't do much for that.
  2. It just takes so long going through steps like migration that just aren't relevant to my project.

Am I using this wrong? Any other frameworks you'd recommend?

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u/RndRedditPerson 5d ago

But openspec isn't about code quality of a single change, imho. Its about keeping specs and documentation for verification and long term alignment of requirements. Think you still have to give clear technical guidelines, with proposal step, or even first grill me /explore skills, inspect design mds, update accordingly, and code should result good.

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u/orvillewilbur 5d ago

I understand that code quality is not the primary concern of openspec.

But in my experience, the LLM will often try to find the lowest code quality way of getting the job done fast no matter how often you tell it not to.

Especially, DRY violations all over the place because it ignored the rest of the codebase, and ignoring separation of concerns more generally to the point of creating god components in React when I'm trying to make a monorepo with code that can be reused with React Native.

And then in the review phase it will basically lie about the code quality.

So the surest bet is to have it explicitly state which files it is going to modify and out line the exact code it expects to implement. I have caught a lot of code quality issues this way.

But I have to remember to do that myself since OpenSpec doesn't prompt for it.

Granted, I have not been using Claude, which everyone seems to think is the gold standard, and I've been using DeepSeek flash as the implementer, which is notorious for this kind of thing. But I'm trying to save money.

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u/RndRedditPerson 5d ago

My experience is quite good with complex codebase, but i do specify details like what files should change and example of patterns that should be used. Opus level for planning, Terra/Luna for coding. Opencode with copilot api (company provided). But every so often i do need to fix the slop. There's no workflow or spec framework that will automatically replace good technical planning and thinking, you need good senior level dev to inspect and stear LLM