Spec

Spec is an adaptive AI Product Manager Agent that runs a 10-step discovery pipeline, from JTBD framing and market sizing to competitor analysis, and exports an engineering-ready Shape Up PRD as Markdown for AI coding tools.

Spec is an AI agent that handles product discovery for founders and indie hackers who build with AI coding tools. Instead of writing code, it produces the planning document that coding assistants need: a structured, engineering-ready product requirements document built on top of real research. The pitch is that fast AI-assisted development often points in the wrong direction when nobody has validated the idea first, and Spec is meant to close that gap before any build begins. A project starts with a single sentence describing the idea. A strategy planner then classifies the product type (SaaS, hardware, game, fintech, healthtech and more than 20 others), chooses how deep the research should go and switches on domain-specific modules, such as regulatory research or supply chain analysis. From there a fixed 10-step pipeline runs: Jobs to Be Done framing, How Might We ideation, a Lean Canvas, market sizing, competitor analysis, persona simulation, assumption mapping, a canvas revision and a final Shape Up PRD. Competitor data comes from scraping rival sites with Firecrawl and searching market sources with Tavily, and the comparison matrix labels each point as match, differentiate or leapfrog. A simulated focus group of three personas applies Van Westendorp price sensitivity analysis to estimate willingness to pay. The workflow is not fully hands-off. It pauses for human approval at the JTBD stage and again at the final PRD, so the user can edit or regenerate before it continues. Progress streams live, and state is checkpointed after each completed node so an interrupted run can resume. A full run typically takes 30 to 60 minutes. The finished PRD exports as a Markdown file containing user stories, data models, API definitions and explicit scope boundaries, ready to paste into an AI coding tool. Among alternatives, Spec sits between a general chat assistant, which answers whatever it is asked, and a manual discovery process run by a product manager. It trades flexibility for a prescribed methodology, which suits solo builders without PM support more than teams with established research practices.