Speckl

Spec-first development with dark provenance. Write what your system should do. Prove it. Ship with full traceability.

Speckl is a multi-agent software development system where the primary artifact is the specification, not the code. Every behavior traces back to its source of intent — automatically.

The Chain of Custody for Intent

Agents generate code. Humans own specifications. The chain of custody for intent stays intact.

That's the old framing. Here's the better one:

SpeckDL is the shared space that both humans and AI can work in.

• Human-judgeable — SpeckDL is declarative enough that a person can inspect a spec and say "yes, this captures my intent." The compiled Wasm is opaque; the spec is not. That's the audit trail. Intent is encoded in the spec because it is verifiable by a person.
• AI-writable — SpeckDL's constrained grammar and declarative semantics make it tractable for LLMs to produce and reason about. Agents can draft, iterate, and refactor specs at machine speed — in the same language the human reviews.

The two properties together are symmetric: humans and agents collaborate in the same medium. The human provides direction and judgment. The agent provides speed and iteration. Both operate on the same semantic layer.

SpeckDL compiles directly to Wasm through a deterministic pipeline. The compiler isn't just a code generator — it's the enforcement point that guarantees what the human signed off on is what gets executed. If it compiles to valid Wasm, the binary is faithful to the spec by construction.

Dark Provenance

Every function, every branch, every side effect in your system is linked to the specification that motivated it. The provenance graph accumulates behind the scenes — invisible until you need it, but always complete. When an auditor asks "why does this code exist?", you don't search Jira. You query the graph.

This isn't traditional traceability (forward-chaining from documents to code). It's the reverse: every runtime behavior backward-traces to its source specification. Specifications are small and stable. Code is derived. The audit surface stays tractable no matter how much code the system contains.

SpeckDL

SpeckDL is the specification language at the core of Speckl. It defines what a system does, not how:

speck RetryHandler {
  input: { operation: Operation, maxRetries: Nat }
  output: Result
  constraint: maxRetries <= 5
  constraint: backoff(delay(n)) == delay(n-1) * 2
  constraint: totalDelay < 30s
  verify: always(implies(attempt > 1, delay > 0))
}

SpeckDL compiles through a deterministic pipeline directly to Wasm:

No LLMs in the compilation path. No non-determinism. Same input, same output — every time.

Architecture

• Orchestrator — client entry point, task decomposition
• Team Leads — manage specialized agents, elastic scaling
• SMEs — hyper-specialized single-task agents (verify, generate, document)
• TillDone — tasks complete when provable conditions are met, not when someone moves a card

Teams self-replicate under load. The harness scales dynamically without human intervention.

Getting Started

1. Read the whitepaper: docs/whitepapers/dark-provenance.md — the core methodology
2. Read the strategy: docs/strategy.md — how Speckl grows from standard → consulting → SaaS → compliance
3. Explore the SpeckDL spec: speckdl/SPEC.md — language definition and examples
4. Run the reference agent: reference-agent/ — working tiered agent implementation

# Clone the repo
git clone https://os.scoble.me/forgejo/sscoble/speckl
cd speckl

# Run the reference agent
cd reference-agent
npm install
npm run dev

Roadmap

Speckl follows a phased strategy — the open standard fuels everything else:

Phase	Focus	Timeline
A — Open Standard	SpeckDL language, Dark Provenance methodology, reference implementations	Now → 3mo
B — Consulting	Hands-on engagements with regulated-industry teams, validating the methodology	Now → 3mo (funds A)
C — Developer Tool (SaaS)	Self-serve platform: spec editor, live Z3 verification, provenance graph browser	3 → 9mo
D — Compliance API	Enterprise provenance engine: audit reports, traceability matrices, compliance packs	9 → 18mo

The standard comes first. Adoption creates the market. The products follow.

Contributing

Speckl is open source under the MIT license. We welcome contributions:

• Language design — refine SpeckDL syntax and semantics
• Formal methods — help verify the compilation pipeline
• Compliance expertise — validate the DO-178C, IEC 62304, ISO 26262 models
• Agent development — build and test the tiered agent harness
• Documentation — make dark provenance accessible to working developers

Open an issue or submit a pull request. See speckdl/SPEC.md for the language spec and docs/ for strategy and methodology documents.

License

MIT © Scott Scoble / Greybeard Holdings, LLC