Types and artifacts

cospec ships eleven schemas, one per conventional-commit type. A change's type is its schema — cospec new <type> <slug> stamps it into the change's .openspec.yaml as schema: <type>. There are no name prefixes, no parallel taxonomy to keep in sync.

Every schema is composed from the same six hand-authored artifacts. Types differ only in which artifacts they declare, which of those are mechanically required, and which instruction variant (full or lite) they use.

artifact	file	role
proposal	proposal.md	Why / What Changes / (Capabilities) / (Surfaces) / Impact
blocking-changes	blocking-changes.md	cross-change dependency ledger
specs	specs/**/*.md	delta specs — see OpenSpec's delta format
design	design.md	Context / Goals / Decisions / Risks
verification	verification.md	per-behavior acceptance-evidence ledger
tasks	tasks.md	numbered checkbox groups tracked during apply

verification is covered in full — its row grammar, layer vocabulary, and per-type required-row rules — on Verification. This page owns the matrix that decides whether a type has one.

The artifact matrix

Each type declares each artifact in one of four states:

• R (required) — declared, and named in apply.requires; apply mechanically gates on it.
• O (optional) — declared, and its instructions/templates are available, but apply does not gate on it.
• O(trig) (optional, soft-promoted) — declared, not in apply.requires, but a checked ## Surfaces flag turns its absence into an exit-code-3 soft blocker at apply (clear it with --allow-soft) and a WARNING at validate (ERROR under --strict). It never becomes a hard requirement — the matrix's shape never changes at gate time, only what apply is willing to wave through.
• F (forbidden) — not declared for this type at all; cospec validate raises meta/forbidden-artifact if the file exists anyway.

type	proposal	blocking-changes	specs	design	verification	tasks
feat	R (full)	R (full)	R	O	R	R
fix	R (full)	R (full)	O	O	R	R
perf	R (full)	R (full)	O	O	R	R
refactor	R (full)	R (full)	O	R	R	R
revert	R (full)	R (full)	O	F	O(trig)	R
build	R (lite)	R (lite)	F	F	O(trig)	R
ci	R (lite)	R (lite)	F	F	O(trig)	R
chore	R (lite)	R (lite)	F	F	F	R
docs	R (lite)	R (lite)	F	F	F	R
style	R (lite)	R (lite)	F	F	F	R
test	R (lite)	R (lite)	F	F	F	R

The Artifacts: plan line cospec new prints, its --jsonartifacts.summary, and the type table in the generated propose and new skills all name every required (R) artifact in flow order — including verification before tasks for feat, fix, perf and refactor. Optional artifacts appear in parentheses (+ design).

tasks is required everywhere and always tracked by apply. Optional artifacts never gate — you can still author them (cospec instructions <artifact> --change <slug> works for any declared artifact), they just don't block apply or archive if left out.

The guidance for writing tasks.md says archiving is not a task. cospec archive validates the change and moves it, and an archive row can only be ticked by the step that refuses it while the change is open. So the list ends at the last implementation or documentation task. Where the repo lands the archive as a commit after the last task, that task ends with "The archive commit follows this one", so it can be ticked before the archive. The templates themselves hold no archive row.

## Surfaces — the soft-nudge block

Every type except the four no-surface light types (chore, docs, style, test) gets a closed, all-optional ## Surfaces checkbox block in its proposal template:

## Surfaces

- [ ] interactive — a user-visible/interactive surface (UI, TUI, CLI UX)
- [ ] deploy — deploy/runtime/CI-execution topology
- [ ] integration — a third-party/external contract
- [ ] agent-behavior — prompts, tools, model routing, agent output shape

These four tokens are the only ones the block accepts. Checking a flag never hard-requires anything by itself — it soft-promotes an otherwise-optional verification row or design section into the soft-blocker set at apply. Leaving every box unchecked changes nothing.

For revert / build / ci, checking any ## Surfaces flag (or, for

build/ci, specifically deploy) is what nudges verification from O(trig) into a soft blocker. A flag-free change of one of these types stays a genuinely two-minute ceremony. :::

The full exit-code semantics for apply — including how a soft blocker (exit 3) differs from a hard blocker (exit 2) — live on Apply and archive.

Per-type rationale

• feat is the only type gated on specs — a new feature that changes no capability's spec is almost always mis-typed. Its verification requirement also gates on a "verified the wrong layer" rule: a [critical] behavior group whose only evidence row is @unit doesn't count.
• fix leaves specs optional but requires verification with a mandatory regression row — a fix whose defect the suite never actually exercised is worthless. Add a spec delta only when the bug meant the living spec itself was wrong.
• perf requires verification rows that prove behavior twice: one row tied to a benchmark, one proving the speedup didn't change behavior.
• refactor is the only type that requires design — it must also prove an invariant: the existing suite passes unchanged.
• revert / build / ci stay light by covenant: verification is soft-promoted only if you check a ## Surfaces flag, never hard-required.
• chore / docs / style / test forbid verification outright. These types have no runtime behavior surface to exercise — a test change is its own verification, a style change is "no semantic diff." Forbidding rather than merely making optional is what protects the two-minute covenant for these four; they also omit ## Surfaces entirely.

Schema versioning and grandfathering

Every schema carries a version, currently 2 (bumped from 1 when verification was introduced). cospec new stamps a change's .openspec.yaml with the schema version current at creation time; changes created before verification existed have no stamp and are treated as schemaVersion: 1.

apply and archive compute their required-artifact set from (type, schemaVersion), filtered to artifacts that existed at that schema version — so a schemaVersion: 1 feat or fix change is never retroactively gated on verification. No in-flight change gets blocked by a schema expansion after the fact.

cospec validate emits a non-blocking INFO naming cospec migrate for any change still on schemaVersion: 1. Running cospec migrate <slug> scaffolds a deferred verification.md (every row marked [~] defer: pre-v2 change, verified out-of-band) and bumps the change's stamp to the current version. cospec doctor lists every change still sitting on an old schema version. Nothing runs this automatically — migration is opt-in, one change at a time.

For the customization tiers available on top of the eleven built-in schemas — openspec/config.yaml rules, and forking a schema as an escape hatch — see Configuration reference.