artifact-driven-dev (ARDD)¶

ARDD is a Claude Code skill pack for artifact-driven development: a small set of living documents (.project/artifacts/) holds the decisions you've actually made, and slash commands check them for consistency and turn them into plans, task lists, and code. It's a workflow, not a generator — you refine the artifacts iteratively, and everything downstream is derived from them.

New to ARDD?¶

Concepts — the mental model in one page
Example — what the files actually look like
Install — one command for a new or existing project
Then the guide that matches your situation:

Your situation	Guide
Starting from scratch — no code, just an idea	Greenfield project
Code exists; bringing it under ARDD	Existing project
Set up and shipping — the day-to-day loop	The core loop
Coming from Spec Kit	Coming from Spec Kit

Going deeper¶

Topic	Doc
Which of the four checking skills you want	Checking skills
Background runs, worktrees, parallel execution, merge conflicts	Parallel work
Mirroring the feature register to GitHub Issues	Tracker sync
Rendering artifacts as Mermaid diagrams	Diagrams

Reference¶

What	Where
Every skill, one page each — usage, reads/writes, behavior	Skills reference
`.project/` file formats, frontmatter schemas, status enums	Project files
The constitution workflow knobs (`workflow_mode`, `delegation`, …)	Configuration
The installed helper scripts skills shell out to	Scripts
Why things are the way they are — the decision records	Decisions

The short version of the workflow¶

/ardd-init                  # once: seed artifacts (interview or codebase survey)
/ardd-refine <artifact>     # capture decisions as you make them
/ardd-backlog <idea>        # log feature ideas the moment you have them
/ardd-feedback <notes>      # capture what you notice using the built thing
/ardd-plan [<slug> ...]     # draft plan → approval checkpoint → tasks file
/ardd-implement             # execute tasks; offers background delegation
/ardd-status                # where do things stand? (auto-runs after most skills)

This site renders the repository's docs/ directory. The repo's README and USAGE hold the GitHub-facing equivalents of this page.