Chaining OpenSpec, Superpowers, and gstack Turns Claude Code Into an Automated Delivery Pipeline
Most AI-coding workflows still treat requirements, testing, review, and release as separate manual steps. Wiring three Claude Code skills into a single session with state isolation and automatic hand-offs turns a chatbot into a gated delivery pipeline—cutting the rework that comes from unverified specs and untested code.
A seven-stage pipeline chains OpenSpec, Superpowers, and gstack to move AI coding from ad-hoc prompting to structured delivery. OpenSpec generates a proposal, spec, design, and task list before any code is written. Superpowers then enforces a strict TDD cycle—tests must exist and fail before implementation begins—and blocks commits that don't pass coverage, lint, and build gates. gstack reads the OpenSpec artifacts to run CEEO, engineering, DX, and security reviews, then drives Playwright E2E tests, auto-bumps versions, generates changelogs, and creates a pull request. The final archive phase diffs the spec against the implementation, records deltas, and merges lessons back into the project's living specification. The four hand-off points—specs feeding plan reviews, TDD tests feeding code review, ship triggering archive, and deltas updating the master spec—form a closed loop where each stage's output becomes the next stage's input without manual orchestration.
Treating the spec as a living document that absorbs implementation deltas—rather than a frozen upfront artifact—turns each feature into accumulated institutional knowledge instead of a one-off delivery.
The workflow's value is less about any single tool and more about the hand-offs: each stage's output is structured so the next stage can consume it without a human translating between formats.
Hard-gating commits on coverage and lint inside the coding agent itself, rather than in CI, shortens the feedback loop from minutes to seconds and makes the gate feel like part of coding rather than a separate process.
Explicit TDD exemption clauses for config files, generated code, and prototypes prevent the iron law from becoming ceremonial overhead on work that doesn't benefit from it.