What changed, and when.

spec-first.com redirects here, to /spec, and until now the page said nothing about why. Spec First was a development method — problem, scope, domain, behaviour, tests, then code, with the behaviour written as Gherkin .feature files — and it is retired. Someone following that redirect arrived at a skill with no idea what had happened to the thing they were looking for. /spec gains a short section at the end saying it: what the method was, what /spec kept from it, and where the full method is still practised.

It is an appendix rather than a step, and it is on the page rather than in the file. The skill itself is unchanged and still at v0.2. A downloaded SKILL.md does not need to carry the history of a method it no longer belongs to, and the partOf label stays unset — the point of that field is to name a method a reader can go and check, which is exactly what this one no longer is.

The README had the same gap twice. It opened by calling this a workbench for practical AI work, which is a claim about what a place could hold rather than what it holds, and its note on partOf said the method had nowhere public to point at when what is true is that the method was retired. Both now say the shorter thing. The new provenance block is documented alongside the checks the build already makes, because it is held to the same standard: a section that exists has to say something.

Section 3 said WeIndie was “a small, independent workbench for trying practical ways of working with them”. A workbench is a claim about what a place could hold, and this site holds four skills — it has held four skills for as long as it has existed. The gap was small and it decided how the page was read: arrive at an umbrella, look for the other things under it, find none, and conclude the work is thinner than it is. The section now opens by saying what the site is rather than what kind of place it is. Four skills, not a framework, not a methodology, and not tied to one model or vendor.

The other half of the same problem was that the links only went one way. The author's index at aarontaylor.me lists this site among the things it indexes, and nothing here pointed back, so a visitor who wondered whether this was all there was had no way to find out. Section 4 gains an Elsewhere row. It is one line in the list of doors and the shortest available answer to the question.

Considered and not done: moving the skills to /skills/ and making this domain an index of its own. It would have changed eight URLs, left the metadata.source line wrong in every SKILL.md already installed somewhere, and produced a second index listing the same work as the first. A short URL that survives being pasted into a conversation is most of what this site is for, and an index already exists elsewhere.

Nearly every claim on this site was built as an antithesis — X rather than Y, X not Y, not just Y. There were about thirty. The shape earns its place in a SKILL.md, where "believed rather than verified" is defining a term and the precision is the whole point. In the copy around the skills it did something else. It gave every sentence an opponent, and the opponent was never named.

"A skill that fires on everything stops meaning anything. There are four." rendered seven times, including directly above the Useful when lists on every skill page. Someone who arrived at /kiss to find out what /kiss does was met first with a proposition about catalogue restraint. It now appears once, on the page of things not built, where it explains a refusal. The skill pages keep the line that was already doing the work: /kiss is allowed to find nothing.

The homepage eyebrow led with a stance where it could have led with an offer, and the claim that a licence is a permission was made three times in three shapes. Those are gone, along with an instruction to the reader about what to install. The page of things not built loses three pieces of self-praise, among them "it is a simple thing being honest about being simple" — a sentence that undoes itself, because narrating restraint is not restraint.

Two dry lines were kept: a more impressive way to be wrong, and a list you do not mail is worse than no list. Both are aimed at this site rather than at anyone else. One spelling was normalised to artefact, the last American form on the site. These entries are untouched — they are dated records of what was thought at the time, and rewriting them backwards would make them worth less.

/ship separated what had been verified from what was being assumed, but only requirement by requirement. A single sentence could still carry both. "The upload limit should be enforced" reads as a pass, and a later reader cannot tell whether should means measured or means guessed — which makes a hedge the worst available place to put uncertainty. It degrades the sentence and it is unaccountable afterwards.

There is now one more line in the reporting section: do not hedge, and resolve a qualified claim into verified or believed. A notation for confidence was considered and left out. A plain sentence carrying the same fact does the same work, and a scale invites a number where nothing was measured.

The page of things deliberately not built gains an entry, on the strongest candidate for a fifth skill so far: a route rather than a territory — what an agent actually needs to pass through, instead of the whole repository. It is untested, and the other four ask a question and return a verdict where that one would produce a document. It is recorded rather than shipped.

Until now this site had no door. No repository link, no address, nowhere to say that a skill had misfired — while the homepage invited you to fork the work. The licence made that legally true in v1.1. It was still practically impossible.

The source is now a public repository, linked from every page, and there is somewhere to report a problem. If a skill behaved badly, a page is wrong, or something here is unclear, that is worth knowing.

This changelog and its feed are also new. Skills carry a version in their frontmatter, and there was no way to learn that the file you downloaded had since changed. Now there is, and the build refuses to run if a skill's version has moved without an entry explaining why.

Also new: a page listing things that were considered and deliberately not built.

Spec First v2 widened what the method covers — shared understanding before execution, with code as one case among planning, research, writing and deciding. /spec was still the narrow, code-only version v2 moved away from. It now says what v2 says, and its example is a message to a landlord rather than an onboarding flow.

Three behaviours are new. It prefers offering a short list of options to asking an open question. It recommends rather than interrogates, because a questionnaire is not a collaborator. And the working understanding is disposable: the default now preserves only what genuinely needs to outlive the task, in whichever ticket or document it already belongs to, instead of writing a competing summary.

Only /spec belongs to Spec First. /drift, /kiss and /ship are about staying on task, simplifying and verifying — which happen during and after execution, not before — so labelling all four as Spec First skills was itself a drift. They are now labelled simply as WeIndie skills.

If you installed 0.1, the whole file is on the page and re-reading it takes a minute. A customised download now records which version it came from.

v1 was a single page. Each skill now has its own address you can send to someone, with a worked example, a prompt to try before installing anything, install paths for each environment, and the whole SKILL.md in the page rather than behind a download.

You can also change the defaults you disagree with in the browser and download the result, with a diff showing exactly what moved. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Underneath, the site became generated. A build script with no dependencies reads the canonical skills and writes the pages, and it refuses to run if a skill and its options have drifted apart. Also added: light and dark themes, self-hosted webfonts so the site still makes no third-party requests, link-preview cards, a real 404 page, a print stylesheet, and an MIT licence — which is what makes "use it, change it, fork it" a permission rather than a sentiment.

Four small skills for working with AI, on one page: /spec, /drift, /kiss and /ship. Plain text, readable in full before you install them, and free to change.

Four is the whole catalogue on purpose. A skill that fires on everything stops meaning anything.