What we do
SpecStep generates the documentation your AI coder won't drift from. You answer a short interview — vision, users, requirements, constraints — and a team of specialist agents collaborates to produce a complete documentation package: vision, requirements, architecture, ADRs, phase plan, traceability matrix, session protocol. Hand it to Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot and they ship without re-deriving context every chat.
Otto runs the interview. When your project hits the edge of his expertise — payments, accessibility, data modelling, security — he pulls in the right specialist live, then folds their input back into the spec.
Why this exists
AI coders are excellent at the next ten lines of code and unreliable at the next ten thousand. They drift. They forget. They invent things that already exist. The fix isn't a smarter prompt — it's giving the agent a written contract about what the system is, how it's organized, and what "done" looks like. Hand-writing that contract is slow and error-prone. SpecStep automates it without sacrificing the rigor.
Who builds SpecStep
SpecStep is built and operated by No Compromise AI, a Delaware corporation — a small, practitioner-run team that leans on AI coding tools heavily. That's exactly why SpecStep exists: we kept hitting the drift problem ourselves.
We dogfood it. SpecStep is built the way we expect you to build with it — an AI coder doing the work against a real spec, with every material decision recorded through our own session-state kit (the same build-session, decision-log, and backlog tooling we ship to you over MCP). The product has to survive its own development before we ask it to survive yours, and the release notes are the receipts.
How it works
The whole flow runs in roughly the time it takes to make a cup of coffee for short projects, or up to half an hour for the most thorough review profile. You can run it in the web app, through the API, or directly from Claude Desktop / Cursor / Copilot via the MCP server.
- Interview — Otto runs a focused conversation covering vision, users, scope, requirements, architecture, and constraints. Specialists join when their expertise is needed. You can pause, resume, and edit answers anytime.
- Generation — A team of agents drafts each file, self-reviews against the rubric, and (depending on the review profile) gets a fresh-eyes pass. Cost and duration estimates are shown up-front, grounded in your actual usage history.
- Delivery — The package downloads as a zip or returns over REST / MCP. Your AI coder reads it, follows it, and stops drifting. Connect a GitHub repository to a project to track build progress against the plan; automated pull-request delivery is on the roadmap.
Four review profiles
- Fast — one self-review round. Good for prototypes and proofs of concept.
- Normal — multiple self-review rounds plus a fresh-eyes pass. The default for production work.
- Extensive — the most thorough review with multiple fresh-eyes passes. For systems where the cost of getting it wrong is high.
- Researcher — runs Fast, Normal, and Extensive in parallel and lines the results up side-by-side: three lenses on the same intake. Useful when you want to see how depth of review changes the package.
Each profile shows a per-intake cost and duration estimate as you go — no hardcoded approximations, no surprise bills.
Three surfaces, one engine
The same generation engine ships behind three surfaces, all on one account, all sharing one rate limit and audit trail:
- Web — the interactive workspace at specstep.com.
- REST + Webhooks — a JSON API for CI integrations and scripts; signed webhooks notify your systems when a generation completes.
- MCP — a JSON-RPC server your AI coder calls directly. Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and other MCP clients sign in through your browser — no API key to copy and paste.
External connectors
Connect a SharePoint site, a OneDrive folder, or a Google Drive folder during the interview and SpecStep summarizes the contents and feeds them into your spec as reference documents — no manual copy-paste. Dropbox is next. Free accounts can connect and preview; generating from connector-sourced references is available on paid plans.
Where we're going
The platform is in active build-out. Near-term: a shared-credit Team plan (coming soon), more specialist agents, and deeper GitHub delivery. We post user-facing changes to the release notes as they ship; drop us a line if you'd like to be notified about something specific.
Built to be trusted with your work
You're handing SpecStep your project's context, so here's how to check our work:
- Release notes — what shipped and when. Proof the product is actively maintained.
- Status — current service health, with maintenance windows emailed ahead.
- Security — how to report a vulnerability, our scope, and safe-harbor terms.
- Privacy & Terms — what we collect, how it's used, and the rules of the road.
- Support & Feedback — a reply within one business day, and a structured channel to shape the roadmap.