Pacto CLI Concepts

Pacto is a spec-driven development tool. Plans are treated as executable specs, and pacto status checks whether the repository can prove the claims the plan makes.

Plan states

Each plan slice belongs to one explicit state:

to-implement for work that has been defined but not started.
current for active work.
done for completed work.
outdated for superseded or stale slices.

<plans-root>/<state>/<slug>/

Evidence-backed verification

Pacto parses plan documents, extracts concrete claims, and compares them with repository evidence. Claim categories include paths, symbols, endpoints, and test references.

Outcome	Meaning
`verified`	The repo evidence matches the claim.
`partial`	Some evidence exists, but not enough to fully support the claim.
`unverified`	The claim has no supporting evidence in the repo.

Capability baselines

In addition to free-form plan notes, Pacto can maintain structured capability specs under .pacto/specs. Plans express changes as deltas, and moving a slice to done merges those changes into the baseline atomically.

.pacto/specs/
├── README.md
└── auth/
    └── spec.md

Workspace artifacts vs product docs

docs/ is the canonical product and user documentation surface.
.pacto/plans/* contains workspace artifacts used by the CLI workflow.

That split keeps the public docs stable while plan slices stay operational and local to the repository.