Spec Kit Dashboard

Turn a repository of Spec Kit features into a focused project workspace inside Visual Studio Code. Spec Kit Dashboard connects specifications, plans, tasks, implementation progress, and guided GitHub Copilot workflows without introducing a separate project database.

The extension reads your workspace files directly. Your specifications remain versioned with the code they describe.

Highlights

• Feature overview: Discover Spec Kit feature folders across single-root and multi-root workspaces and see lifecycle, progress, blockers, and test evidence at a glance.
• Guided workflow: Run Specify, optional Clarify, Plan, Tasks, and Implement from one workspace with prerequisite-aware navigation.
• Agent skills: Run each workflow step with its matching Spec Kit workspace skill, including project-specific hooks, and choose from the language models available in VS Code.
• Azure DevOps backlog: Load Features from a configured team backlog or by work item ID, then filter by text, state, and assignee.
• Implementation board: Track tasks through Planned, Doing, For Review, Approved, and Done, including agent metadata and subtask progress.
• Artifact reader: Render Markdown, JSON, YAML, CSV, and text files, follow safe document links, and jump back to source.
• Project context: Browse the constitution, glossary, lint and decay results, Git worktrees, and environment diagnostics.
• Accessible reading: Listen to Markdown with configurable Microsoft Edge neural text-to-speech controls.

Guided Spec Kit Workflow

Select an Azure DevOps Feature, prepare its branch, and move through the complete Spec Kit lifecycle from the Arbeitsbereich view. Forward steps unlock when their required predecessor artifacts exist; completed steps remain available for review.

The guided workflow integration is based on Spec Kit 1.0.3, including its SKILL.md workflows and extension hooks.

Each step has its own conversation history, active instruction, elapsed run time, cancellation, and structured clarification handling. Changes can be committed and pushed per workflow step from the dashboard.

Explore Every Artifact

The navigation brings the full feature dossier together: Overview, Workitem, Specify, Plan, Tasks, Implement, Research, Contracts, Checklists, Quickstart, Data Model, and Test Results. Project-wide Constitution, Glossary, and Diagnostics views keep implementation decisions grounded in repository context.

The dashboard automatically refreshes when watched artifacts change and remembers the selected feature, page, and sidebar state per workspace.

Implementation Board

Tasks are grouped into five lanes: Planned, Doing, For Review, Approved, and Done. Select a task to inspect its source location, profile, assigned agent, role, model, and nested checklist progress.

Optional bracket tags enrich standard GitHub Flavored Markdown tasks:

- [ ] T020 [US2] [Lane: For Review] [Profile: Hoch] [Agent: Review Agent] [Role: Reviewer] [Model: GPT-5] Validate workflow

The profiles Leicht, Mittel, and Hoch map to their corresponding task executors when no explicit agent is present.

Getting Started

1. Open a workspace and complete the required first-run setup.
2. Choose English or German as the interface language.
3. Decide whether to enable Azure DevOps. When disabled, the extension uses local specifications and does not connect to Azure DevOps.
4. Optionally choose a default Spec Kit folder. It is available in every VS Code workspace; otherwise, the extension uses the configured folders in the current workspace.
5. Select the Spec Kit Dashboard icon in the Activity Bar and choose Open Dashboard.

Run Spec Kit Dashboard: Run Setup to change the language, Azure DevOps integration, or folder choice later. The default folder can also be changed with Spec Kit Dashboard: Select Default Spec Folder or the speckitBoard.defaultSpecRoot setting.

Feature directories are recognized by the configurable pattern ^[0-9]+-.+$, for example:

specs/
└── 170254-manage-nutrients/
	├── spec.md
	├── plan.md
	├── tasks.md
	├── research.md
	├── data-model.md
	├── quickstart.md
	├── contracts/
	└── checklists/

Requirements

• Visual Studio Code 1.125 or newer.
• Spec Kit 1.0.3 project structure and workflow skills.
• Feature folders named like specs/170254-artikel-naehrstoffpflege.
• Core Markdown artifacts such as spec.md, plan.md, and tasks.md; incomplete folders remain visible.
• GitHub Copilot Chat with the required Spec Kit skills under .github/skills/ or another supported workspace skill location.
• A Microsoft account with access to the configured Azure DevOps organization when backlog integration is enabled.

Settings

• speckitBoard.setupCompleted: Indicates that the required first-run setup is complete.
• speckitBoard.language: Dashboard interface language (en or de). Default: en.
• speckitBoard.azureDevOps.enabled: Enables Azure DevOps work items and backlog access. Default: false; no Azure DevOps connection is made while disabled.
• speckitBoard.defaultSpecRoot: Absolute local Spec Kit root available in every workspace.
• speckitBoard.specRoots: Workspace-relative Spec Kit roots. Default: ['specs'].
• speckitBoard.featureFolderPattern: Feature folder regular expression.
• speckitBoard.watchDebounceMs: Delay before changed files are rescanned.
• speckitBoard.maxArtifactBytes: Maximum Markdown artifact size.
• speckitBoard.requireTestEvidence: Completion policy for test evidence.
• speckitBoard.showIncompleteFeatures: Include folders with missing core artifacts.
• speckitBoard.overrideFileName: Optional status-override file name.
• speckitBoard.glossaryFiles: Ordered workspace-relative YAML or JSON glossary candidates.
• speckitBoard.lintReportFiles: Ordered workspace-relative JSON lint report candidates.
• speckitBoard.azureDevOps.organization: Organization used by the guided workspace. Required for backlog integration.
• speckitBoard.azureDevOps.project: Project containing the feature backlog. Required for backlog integration.
• speckitBoard.azureDevOps.team: Team whose Feature backlog is shown. Required for backlog integration.
• speckitBoard.speech.voice: Edge TTS neural voice. Default: de-DE-KatjaNeural; de-DE-ConradNeural is an alternative German voice.
• speckitBoard.speech.rate: Edge TTS speech rate such as default, -10%, or +10%.

When Azure DevOps is enabled and the organization, project, or team is missing, the Work item view asks for the missing values before connecting. Invalid configured values continue to surface the API error so they can be corrected in Settings.

Privacy and Network Access

Local feature discovery, parsing, rendering, and status calculation run against workspace files. The following optional features use external services:

• Guided workflows invoke GitHub Copilot Chat and the selected language model.
• Azure DevOps integration reads work items from the configured organization and project using the Microsoft account authorized through VS Code.
• Markdown speech sends the currently requested sentence to the Microsoft Edge online text-to-speech service. No API key is required, and complete documents are not sent at once.

Known Issues

• A watched change currently rescans the complete configured Spec Kit root.
• Virtual workspaces are disabled until their watcher and file-system behavior is covered by integration tests.