Lifecycle phase 1 of 13
Plan and specify: AI tools
Requirements, PRDs, tickets and spec-driven development: turning intent into a spec an agent can build against.
12 tools list this as the main phase, and 7 more tools cover it. Each claim is the vendor's own words, and every fact on a tool's page links to its source.
Main phase
8090 Software Factory8090“The AI-native software development platform that keeps business leaders in the driver's seat, from spec to deploy.”
BMAD-METHODBMad Code“Breakthrough Method for Agile AI-Driven Development: open-source skills that bring planning and architecture into an agent's delivery workflow.”ChatPRDChatPRD“The AI product manager for your entire team: writes product docs, coaches PMs and hands specs to coding agents.”
KiroAmazon Web Services“Turn prompts into executable specs, validate code correctness and build across large codebases with parallel agents.”
LinearLinear“The system for product development, purpose-built for planning and building products with AI agents.”
OpenSpecFission AI“Spec-driven development for AI coding assistants, working with the 30+ tools a team already uses rather than one IDE.”
Rinkata HubRinkata“Where your team and your AI agents share one source of truth: goals, specs and decisions, so agents stay on track.”
Spec KitGitHub“Open-source toolkit for spec-driven development: commands that take an agent from intake through research and definition to tasks.”
SpecStory (RunStory)SpecStory“Saves the conversations behind your code; its RunStory product tests software and sends defects back to the coding agent.”
Taskmaster AIHamster“Open-source, CLI-first tool that structures AI agent work: parse PRDs into tasks and subtasks with dependencies and acceptance criteria.”TesslTessl“Agent enablement platform: gives coding agents structured, versioned context, with a registry of skills and evals of model and agent harness combinations.”
TraycerTraycer AI“Spec-first development for AI coding workflows: plan changes as epics, then hand them to the coding agent you already pay for.”
Also covers this phase
Tools whose main phase is another one.
ClineCline“Open-source AI coding agent with Plan/Act modes, MCP integration and terminal-first workflows, using any model or endpoint.”
DevinCognition“Devin, the first autonomous software engineer, plans, writes, tests and ships production code inside your existing workflows.”
G5G5 Labs“The semantic abstraction layer for AI-native development: natural-language intent becomes the source code.”
GitHub CopilotGitHub (Microsoft)“Your AI coding agent, every step of the way from an open issue to reviewing and merging a pull request, in the editor, terminal or github.com.”
GitLab Duo Agent PlatformGitLab“Custom AI workflow automation across the software lifecycle: specialised agents for planning, coding, security and deployment.”
IBM Bob (formerly watsonx Code Assistant)IBM“IBM Bob, an AI coding agent that accelerates delivery and application modernization across complex enterprise codebases.”
Rovo DevAtlassian“Atlassian's AI coding agent for software teams: plan, generate and review code from Jira, the CLI and Bitbucket; folding into Jira subscriptions.”