Feature request: Treat clarify, checklist, and analyze as regular Spec Kit workflow steps #2496

Feature request: Treat clarify, checklist, and analyze as regular Spec Kit workflow steps

I would like to suggest changing the way the Spec Kit workflow presents the commands clarify, checklist, and analyze.

Today, these steps are often perceived as optional. Based on my practical experience since February 2026, I would strongly recommend presenting them as regular workflow steps instead.

My suggested workflow would be:

1. specify
2. clarify
3. plan
4. tasks
5. checklist
6. implement
7. analyze

The reason is quality and reliability. In my projects, consistently running all of these steps has produced very strong results. In particular, the additional clarification, checklist, and analysis phases have significantly reduced ambiguity and, from my perspective, have almost eliminated model hallucinations in the implementation workflow.

I also found that the model harness configuration matters. For agents such as Codex, Gemini, Copilot, or Claude, the reasoning/effort level should be set to high, preferably extra high, when working through the Spec Kit workflow. For the final analyze step, I would recommend using the maximum available reasoning level.

For higher-confidence results, I also recommend running the final analyze step a second time with another model as an independent reviewer.

This could be documented as a recommended high-assurance workflow, for example:

specify -> clarify -> plan -> tasks -> checklist -> implement -> analyze -> second-model analyze review

The goal is not necessarily to remove the lightweight workflow, but to make the complete workflow more visible and recommended for users who want higher reliability, lower ambiguity, and stronger quality gates.

Would the Spec Kit maintainers consider documenting clarify, checklist, and analyze as regular recommended workflow steps, or adding a separate “high-assurance workflow” section to the documentation?