What best practices exist for concurrent SpecKit development?

[EmadMokhtar]

Hi,

I’m working with SpecKit and I’m concerned about how a team can collaborate without running into conflicts. Because SpecKit’s specs are sequentially numbered, it can be difficult to avoid clashes when multiple engineers are creating specs concurrently.

Example

A repository already contains three specs. Two engineers each create a short‑lived feature branch to implement new features. Using SpecKit, both engineers would try to create the next spec, 0004, which will inevitably cause a merge conflict.

Question

What strategies does SpecKit recommend to prevent such conflicts?

• Does the SpecKit team provide guidelines or tooling for concurrent spec creation in a multi‑engineer environment?
• Are there recommended branching or spec‑numbering workflows that teams can adopt to avoid these merge conflicts?

[mnriem]

I would say define who is the source of truth for:

1. The branch naming
2. The feature spec directory naming

Then when you go through the process you specifically guide the commands to use those

PS. we have a PR in flight that will hopefully make that a bit smoother

[EmadMokhtar]

Let me explain my question.

Here’s an example: the repository starts with an initial spec, and two developers branch off from the main branch.
Developer 1 is working on the add user form spec, which creates a new spec index of 0002.
Developer 2 is working on the add support form spec, which also creates a new spec index of 0002.

Developer 1 merges their feature into the main branch. Later, Developer 2 merges theirs into main. As a result, main now contains two specs both labeled 0002, breaking the chronological order of the specs.

---

Suggestion

Replacing the current integer‑incrementing index with a timestamp index will yield a more accurate chronological ordering of the specifications.

[EmadMokhtar]

Ohhhhhhhhhhh I can find my suggestion in the speckit code.

# Warn if --number and --timestamp are both specified
if [ "$USE_TIMESTAMP" = true ] && [ -n "$BRANCH_NUMBER" ]; then
    >&2 echo "[specify] Warning: --number is ignored when --timestamp is used"
    BRANCH_NUMBER=""
fi
 

[EmadMokhtar]

I tried it and it's working.

You need to initiate it with --branch-numbering timestamp argument and it's working.

Full command:

specify init . --integration copilot --branch-numbering timestamp

[Service07]

I've adapted my scripts, agents, and templates to work by branch name; this solves your problem.

[EmadMokhtar]

Can you share how you've done it in details?