Not notes on a wish.
A spec you can audit.

What is an audit-grade specification?

An audit-grade specification is one where every requirement has a number, a measurable target, and a link back to the sentence in the original ask that produced it. What it assumes is written down instead of kept in someone's head. What the ask left out is raised as an open question instead of quietly filled in. An evaluator can check it line by line.

A normal spec is a document someone wrote once and nobody reads again. This one is the contract the whole pipeline runs on. The checks are built from it, the code is written to it, the deploy is read out of it, and the production signals are tied back to it. Change the spec and everything downstream knows.

The one thing everything else answers to.

Every line carries its receipts.

A few lines. Their whole trail.

A slice of a real spec. Each line has an id, a measurable requirement, the clause it came from, and the check that proves it. The one still open is a gap named, not a blank quietly filled in.

Hand it to someone who trusts none of it.

Audit-grade is not a compliment we pay it. It is a test it passes. You can hand this document to an evaluator, a regulator, or a sceptical client, and they can check it themselves without taking a single line on faith.

If the source didn't say it, the spec doesn't claim it.

And the same three checks that guard the code guard the spec. The maker writes it, a pilot re-checks every line against the ask, and a watcher outside the system holds back anything that can't show where it came from.

Made once. Read the whole way.

Capture is the stage that writes it, out of a rough ask. From there it is not a document that gets filed. It is the live contract the rest of CRAFT reads from, all the way to a signal in production.