A specification is more than text. It comes with a wireframe, the regulatory PDF it answers to, the API contract it has to honour, the stakeholder slide deck someone negotiated against. For a long time, none of that lived in my spec tree. The Markdown files were git-tracked; the evidence behind them rotted in Confluence, in shared drives, in pasted-and-lost screenshots in chat.

This week I shipped a fix in v0.9.7 of the VS Code extension I maintain. The shape of the fix is the part I want to write about, because the obvious version of it would have been wrong.

Full disclosure: I'm the creator of SPECLAN , a VS Code extension that manages product specifications as Markdown files with YAML frontmatter — Git-native, one file per requirement, organized in a hierarchical tree.…