ragnarwestad/aide

What Aide is
What a spec looks like
Where Aide sits in spec-driven development
The aide- skills
Install & Configuration
Per-project configuration
The workflow, step by step
The Aide dashboard
Resources
Spec-driven development for Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and GitHub Copilot: every change starts as a spec, and a
dashboard runs it through analysis, implementation and archiving.
## What Aide is
Aide is a tool for spec-driven development: before an AI CLI writes code, it writes a specification — four
plain-Markdown files (description, analysis, solution, status) that you and any AI CLI can read, review and
continue identically. The spec is committed to git, either in the project it describes or in a specs repository of
its own.
The repository holds Aide's two parts side by side: core/ has the skills, rules, templates and scripts, with an
installer for each AI CLI, and dashboard/ has the dashboard, which uses them. The layout is in
DEVELOPING.md.
### The skills
Each step of the workflow — create, analyze, implement and archive — is an aide- skill: a command you type in
Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or GitHub Copilot, one spec at a time, and follow as it works.
See The aide-\ skills.
### The dashboard
The dashboard is a local web application. You install it on one machine — your own, or one that is always on — and
open it in a browser at http://127.0.0.1:8788. It lists every spec in every project Aide knows about, and runs
the skills itself: you queue a spec, and it runs create, analyze, implement and archive in order, on the AI CLI
and model chosen for each step, several specs at a time. It records each step's cost, token count and outcome, and
holds a spec before archive until you have ticked its acceptance criteria.
See The Aide dashboard.
### Aide is a personal tool
It is installed for one user on one machine, and the dashboard has no sign-in and no notion of who is using it:
every run uses the AI account of the user it runs as. Nothing has to be committed to a project for Aide to work on
it, which is what makes it usable on a repository someone else owns.
### It works with four AI CLIs
Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Copilot read and continue the same spec, so each step can run on whichever tool
suits it, and the spec is what carries the work between them.
### What the spec is for
Requirements that live only in a chat history disappear with it: the reasoning behind a decision is gone, the next
session starts from zero, and you cannot go back and see what was agreed before the code was written. The spec
holds what the chat loses — the affected files with their line numbers, the plan written before the code, and a
record of what each step did — reviewable as a diff before a line of code changes, and still there a month later.
## What a spec looks like
A spec is a folder of four files:
1-description.md — what is wrong and what done means. The user writes it, or has /aide-create draft it from a
title and a few sentences
2-analysis.md — what analyze found in the codebase
3-solution.md — the plan analyze writes for implement to follow
4-status.md — where every step records its progress
This is an archived spec from Aide's own work, shortened where it says [...].