Requirements
Define, debate, and refine product requirements in a collaborative, agent-assisted workspace.
Fast code is useless without clear direction. The Requirements module gives teams a collaborative, agent-assisted workspace to define, debate, and refine requirements.
Requirements documents define what the product should do and why, without prescribing how it is built. They capture business context, user needs, feature behavior, and technical constraints in a human-readable form.
The navigator organizes requirements into two sections:
| Section | Purpose | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Product Overview | Establish shared strategic context | The product as a whole |
| Feature Requirements | Define clear, testable product behavior | One authoritative feature specification |
Requirements and Blueprints work together
Feature Requirements describe product intent. Feature Blueprints describe the technical design that delivers it. To have the agent point out where they disagree, add the drift automations described in Keep requirements and blueprints aligned.
Getting started
Every new project starts with six Product Overview documents that hold placeholder content: Business Problem, Current State, Product Description, Personas, Success Metrics, and Technical Requirements. You don't need to fill them in first. The Get Started workflow fills them in with you.
Select Get Started
While the Feature Requirements section is empty, a Get Started button appears under it. It opens the agent, which asks whether you want to import an existing app or design a new one.
- Import an existing app. The agent surveys your connected codebase and drafts the overview documents, feature requirements, and blueprints from it.
- Design a new app. The agent interviews you to fill in the overview documents, then helps you scope an initial set of features.
When your requirements are ready, the agent offers to move on to Blueprints, then Work Orders. It asks before each step.
Refine your Feature Requirements
Keep working with the agent to refine the Feature Requirements documents. New documents start from a template, which you can change under Settings → Modules → Requirements in Overview Document Template and Feature Document Template. When the agent writes requirements, it follows the project's Requirements Writing Rules skill.
Navigate requirements
The navigator lists every requirements document. Use its view picker to switch between three views:
- Tree shows the Product Overview and Feature Requirements sections in their saved order.
- A–Z lists every document by title.
- Recently edited puts the documents with the latest changes first.
The view picker also has a Filter by title box.
Edit, suggest, and review
Use the mode selector at the end of the formatting toolbar to choose how you work:
| Mode | What it does |
|---|---|
| Editing | Your changes apply to the document directly. |
| Suggesting | Your changes are recorded as tracked suggestions that someone accepts or rejects. |
| Viewing | Shows the document without pending suggestions. |
Editing and Suggesting need Editor access to Requirements. Viewers read documents in Viewing mode and don't see the selector.
Suggestions appear inline in their author's color. Each suggestion also has a thread that shows where it came from: a person, the agent, an automation, an MCP client, or the external API. Select Accept or Reject on the thread to resolve it.
The changes navigator steps through changes one at a time. By default it shows the changes your agent made for you, and you can filter it by author and by source (All, Manual, or Agent). Accept All and Reject All resolve every change the navigator is showing in the current document. When changes span several documents, the navigator also takes you to the next document to review.
Comments
Select text and choose Comment to start a thread on that passage, or Ask agent to bring the passage into the agent chat. You can also open the Comments panel and select Add Comment.
- Filter the panel to Open or Resolved threads. Resolve a thread with its check button, and reopen it with Re-open thread.
- Threads you have not read show a dot, and the navigator marks documents that have unread comments. Use Mark read or Mark unread from a thread's menu.
- Copy Link copies a link to the thread. Opening the link takes you to the document and shows the thread beside its passage.
- Reply to a thread from the reply box at its bottom.
Version history
Select Version History in the panel controls to see how requirements changed. Versions are saved automatically as people and agents edit, and each version covers every requirements document in the project.
- History lists versions. Filter them by This Document, All, or Named. Select New to save a version yourself, and use Name this version to label an important one.
- Compare shows what changed between any two versions.
- To roll a document back, select an older version and choose Restore this document from that document's menu.
Requirements Agent
The Requirements Agent assists throughout the requirements lifecycle.
Drafting and initialization
The agent can analyze notes, transcripts, designs, images, codebases, and other artifacts to draft structured requirements and propose features.
Review and quality checks
The agent reviews documents for ambiguity, gaps, conflicts, and duplication. It surfaces issues as comments and summarizes them in the agent panel.
Question answering
Ask targeted questions to receive concise answers with direct references to source content.
Feature organization
The agent can suggest creating, splitting, merging, or reorganizing features. Its edits to document content arrive as tracked suggestions for you to review.
Keep requirements and blueprints aligned
Drift checks are off until you turn them on. There are two separate ways to do that.
Drift automations leave comments on your documents in 8090 Software Factory. Add them from the Recommended section of the Automations page:
- Sync Blueprints and Requirements runs when a requirement or blueprint changes, and leaves drift comments on the linked blueprint.
- Detect Code Drift runs on code pushes. For feature blueprints, it also comments on the linked feature requirements where the code no longer matches them.
Drift comments are ordinary comment threads. Their author line shows the automation that wrote them.
Drift Bot reviews pull requests instead. It compares each pull request against your Blueprints and Requirements and posts what it finds on the pull request in GitHub or GitLab. Turn it on for a repository in Settings → Codebase. See Drift Bot.
Export
Select Export in the document header to download requirements as Markdown, then choose what to export:
- Export this requirements document downloads the open document.
- Export all requirements documents as one document downloads every requirements document in a single Markdown file, with a table of contents, in the order the navigator shows them.
Images export as links to files stored in 8090 Software Factory, so they don't display in other Markdown viewers. To export a past version, open version history, select the version, and use Export there.
Best practices
- Treat requirements as living documents.
- Anchor strategy in Product Overview documents.
- Keep Feature Requirements precise and implementation-agnostic.
- Use the agent early, then refine collaboratively.
- Turn on the drift automations, Drift Bot, or both, so requirements, blueprints, and code stay in sync.
Ready to translate requirements into technical specifications? Learn about Blueprints.