Proper usage of /consitution

[stephen-woods]

I'm just trying this out for a simple exercise. I created a new project using the uvx command for a Github Copilot agent with sh scripts, and I can see the .specify directory has been created. And then, in VSCode, I run the /consitution command using the following prompt with a Claude Sonnet 4 model:

A rust module that creates a parser combinator using NOM that implements the same grammar that is defined in the Scala Fastparse ASTgrammar.scala file found in this project. This project has minimal dependencies. This parser should not fail silently, but instead be able to pinpoint where a syntax error is in the string input. The abstract syntax tree that results from a successful parse should be able to be traversed multiple times.

The agent then just starts coding everything.... the consitution.md markdown never gets updated, I don't get to use /specify, /plan, /tasks, or /implement before it starts generating code, tests, and a README.

Maybe I'm missing something? Am I using this incorrectly? Is my constitution prompt too specific?

[amosgeva]

Your /consitution prompt is the issue here. Try something like:
/constitution Create principles focused on code quality, testing standards, user experience consistency, and performance requirements of a Rust module that creates a parser combinator using NOM that implements the same grammar that is defined in the Scala Fastparse ASTgrammar.scala file found in this project. This project has minimal dependencies. This parser should not fail silently, but instead be able to pinpoint where a syntax error is in the string input. The abstract syntax tree that results from a successful parse should be able to be traversed multiple times.

[stephen-woods]

Thanks, that does seem to work better... but it differs from what Den shows in his videos. In his videos, the constitution prompt he gives is pretty much a very high level description of the project. It just seems like either I was using it wrong, or the intended guard rails that spec-kit was supposed to be putting in place were not being honored.

[amosgeva]

I think it's the /constitution prompt needs to be adjusted to honor sentences that not starting with create, build, etc. My experience for the last week or so is that you need to give it a direct order if you want to get it to do what it intended to. Otherwise like your prompt it will get lost and skip it.

[jeremyeder]

Would you prefer a more composable UX? We would. #316