Your docs, your designs, your diagrams. One Functional Spec.
The new ARCitect builds a Functional Spec with you from every source your team already has.
Every project starts with more context than ever. There’s a PRD in Google Docs, a roadmap in Notion, architecture diagrams, screens from Claude Design, and decisions scattered across all of them. Each one holds part of the picture. None of them is the whole thing.
A team still needs one clear, consistent definition of what it’s building. That matters even more when part of the team is coding agents, each working from whatever context it was handed.
Until now, ARCitect started from an idea and helped you shape it into a system. Today’s release goes upstream, to the definition of what’s being built in the first place. Bring every source your team has, and work with ARCitect to build one Functional Spec from all of it.
Bring everything you have
- Every kind of source, including your prototype. Text documents, Notion and Google Docs exports, images and diagrams, and HTML and Claude Design screens. If you’ve already built a prototype, its screens are a source too.
- Every source checked against the others. ARCitect works through each one, connects what they say, sharpens the features and requirements, and surfaces conflicts and gaps before they become delays, bugs, and missed features.
- One Functional Spec you can edit. Every decision lands in one place that your whole team, and every agent working with it, builds from.
Where sources disagree
The gaps are rarely dramatic. A PRD lists five order states, and the design shows a Cancel button. Is cancelled a state or not? Left alone, the data model, the API, and the screen each answer that differently. ARCitect brings it to you with both sources side by side, before anyone writes code.
Order states
- 01Received
- 02Preparing
- 03Ready
- 04Picked up
- 05Delivered
- ??Cancelled
Order queue
1× Cappuccino, 1× Oat Cookie
ARCitect · Conflict
Is Cancelled an order state?
The PRD defines five order states. The staff screen lets a barista cancel an order. Left alone, the data model, the API, and the screen will each answer differently.
A Functional Spec is built, not found
Put all your sources side by side and something becomes clear: they don’t add up to one answer. They overlap, they disagree, and they leave things out. The spec your team needs isn’t hiding inside them.
Our early customer conversations kept coming back to this. A Functional Spec is something you build from your sources, ARCitect’s findings and suggestions, and the decisions you make along the way. Together they make the best definition yet of what your product and system should be.
Turning documents into more documents is easy. More markdown isn’t more definition.
ARCitect is built to produce one coherent Functional Spec, and we believe that process leads to better software.
Production-grade specs make everything after them faster
A Functional Spec built this way is production-grade. The questions that usually surface mid-sprint, or worse, in production, get answered before the first commit. That makes development faster, whoever writes the code: your team, your coding agents, a development agency, or you on your own.
You’ll notice it in the questions that stop coming. When a new engineer or an agent needs to know whether an order can be cancelled, the answer is already in the Functional Spec. Nobody has to stop and ask you.
A big step toward spec-as-source
We’ve written before about spec-as-source: define the app once, and produce the system from that definition. This release is the biggest step we’ve taken toward it.
A Functional Spec makes your team faster, your code better, and your customers happier. Code Reactor, ARC’s code generation engine, goes even further: it turns the Functional Spec itself into a production system ready to deploy to AWS. The spec becomes the system. If you want to build with ARC, contact us at contact@buildwitharc.io.
Built the way we build
We built this release of ARCitect with ARCitect. In the coming weeks, Build With ARC will walk through real projects, ours included, from first source to production, decisions and all.
Prototypes got easy. Production didn’t.
Start with one Functional Spec your whole team builds from.