specpilot archive

Software documentation often rots the moment a feature ships, leaving developers with zero context on past technical decisions. This skill automates the archiving of completed requirements, ensuring your project history remains searchable and structured without manual overhead. It transforms messy working drafts into clean, standardized archive files while maintaining the full technical context for future reference.

What it does

• Standardized archiving generates compact requirement records using a predefined template for quick lookups.
• Index synchronization updates your central requirement registry to reflect completion status and timelines.
• Version tracking handles iterative requirements by linking new work to legacy IDs and updating status flows.
• Context preservation retains draft files and design documents as "technical bibles" rather than deleting them.
• Automated metadata extracts key descriptors and timestamps to maintain a consistent naming convention.

How it works

1. Identify the requirement ID from user input or by scanning the in_progress list in the index file.
2. Validate the existence of working drafts and associated technical design documents.
3. Generate the finalized archive file using the REQ-000-template.md structure.
4. Update the index.md status, adding completion dates and handling iteration logic for parent requirements.

Frameworks & tools

This skill operates on local Markdown-based documentation systems, specifically targeting workflows that use a docs/specpilot/ directory structure for requirement management.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Manual archiving is prone to skipped steps, like forgetting to update the master index or losing the "why" behind a change. This skill enforces a strict documentation lifecycle that ensures every completed feature has a corresponding audit trail and technical summary.

Use cases

• Closing out a sprint by archiving all requirements marked as done in the implementation phase.
• Documenting an iterative change that supersedes a previous requirement ID.
• Generating a quick-reference summary for a complex feature to help new team members.
• Cleaning up the in_progress workspace while keeping implementation notes for debugging.

Known limitations

Requires a specific directory structure (docs/specpilot/requirements/) to function. It only archives requirements that have existing draft files or were previously initialized in the index.