Concepts
Specifications
Detailed project knowledge the agent discovers and retrieves on demand.
What is a Specification?
A Specification is detailed project knowledge — system behavior, API contracts, architecture for a specific area — that the agent discovers and retrieves when it's relevant, instead of carrying it on every prompt.
Specification vs. Ruleset
| Ruleset | Specification |
|---|---|
| How should the agent work? | How should the system behave? |
| "All API endpoints use service classes." | "Checkout flow architecture and payment-state transitions." |
| Always in context | Retrieved when needed |
How the agent discovers one
Specifications don't get pushed into every prompt in full — that would make the automatic context too large to be useful. Instead, the context the agent receives automatically includes a lightweight index: each active Specification's name and description, not its content.
When the agent decides a Specification is relevant — usually because it's working on a Task linked to it, or its description matches what it's doing — it retrieves the full content on demand through the MCP tool xorox_get_specification. See MCP tools for the full list.
Descriptions aren't just a human-facing summary — they're what the agent uses to decide whether to retrieve the full content. Describe both what the Specification covers and when it applies, e.g. "Frontend design requirements. Applies to forms, layouts, typography, and user-facing components."
Status
Like Rulesets, a Specification has a status of active, inactive, or archived. Only active Specifications appear in the automatic index or can be retrieved by the agent.