Create a spec

Authoring a spec is a conversation, not a form. You open an OPAL chat and describe what you want; the model calls the spec.* tasks to create and refine the work, and everything it writes lands in the spec database rather than in a file you have to find and keep tidy.

There is no Spec desk any more. The card wall, the brief form and the triage screen were retired once the database existed — see what changed at the bottom if you used them.

Ask for it

1. Open the OPAL chat.
2. Say what the spec should cover. A paragraph is plenty to start.

Trove replies by creating the spec and telling you its key — a short stable id like sqb4gsd1zn9. That key is how you refer to this spec from now on; it never changes, even if you rename the spec or move its sections around.

You can be as rough as you like. "A spec for reworking the rover gait, with sections for stance transitions and foot placement" is enough — the model will create the spec, add the sections, and read them back to you.

Refine it

Keep talking. Everything you can do to a spec, you do by asking:

• Add or change a section — "add a section on ground contact detection".
• Break work out — "turn the stance-transition section into work units".
• Search — "which specs mention BLE reconnect?" Searching is free and never asks permission, so the model can look things up mid-conversation without interrupting you.
• Look at history — "what changed in this spec, and who changed it?" Every edit is recorded with its author, so the answer is exact rather than remembered.

Writes are one thing at a time, on purpose. There is no "update everything matching" — the surfaces where one careless call rewrites fifty rows are simply not offered.

Give each unit a Definition of Done

Every work unit carries a Definition of Done, and it is required rather than encouraged: a unit whose done-ness cannot be checked is a unit that will be argued about later. Say what "finished" means — a test that passes, a command that exits zero, a behaviour you can see — and the model records it with the unit.

Run it

When the work is described, ask Trove to run it. It picks up the units, gives each one to a lane, and reports back as they finish. Watch progress on the project board's Build tab, where each lane shows what it is working on and how far along it is.

What changed, and why

If you used the old Spec desk: the "+" tile, the brief form, the triage screen and the Design tab are gone.

They were a UI for editing spec documents in a per-lane spec worktree. Specs are rows in a database now, not files in a branch — so a file tree and an editor were describing a thing that no longer exists. The conversation replaces them, and it can do things the forms could not: ask questions back, search everything you have ever written, and cite the exact section it is about to change.

Nothing you wrote is lost. Existing .md specs stay exactly where they are in the repository; Trove never migrated them automatically, and it never will without you asking. Bring them across when you want to, on your terms.