Atalaya: an approval gate and requirement tracking on top of OpenSpec, for teams where the PM isn't in the terminal

[silvap-javier]

Hi all 👋

I've been using OpenSpec with Claude Code for a few months and wanted to share what I built around it, and ask for feedback.

The problem I kept hitting: OpenSpec made Claude Code write a proposal before coding, which is great — but the proposal lived in the repo. The person who asked for the change (a PM, someone from support, a client) never saw it. Approval was "the dev read it and said OK in the chat", and nobody outside the terminal knew what state each requirement was in.

What I built: Atalaya, a work manager (tasks, sprints, Kanban) where OpenSpec changes are first-class:

• Requirements start in the task, in plain words, written by whoever asks for the change.
• A Claude Code plugin wraps the OpenSpec workflow: /sdd-nueva WEB-12 reads the task and runs the OpenSpec proposal/specs/design/tasks, then reports them to Atalaya over MCP.
• A person approves in Atalaya. /sdd-aplicar refuses to start until there's an approval, and the agent's token can't approve its own change. If the spec changes after approval, Atalaya flags the drift and asks again.
• /sdd-cerrar checks each acceptance criterion with its evidence and archives the change, so the specs in openspec/specs/ stay alive.
• Each requirement shows its state in plain words (not started → in development → tested → in production), linked to PRs and deployments, so the PM can follow it without opening GitHub.

The specs stay as plain OpenSpec files in your repo — if you stop using Atalaya, you keep everything.

Atalaya is built with Atalaya: every change goes through this same flow (10 archived changes so far).

Where I'd love your input:

1. How do you handle approval today? Is it a PR review of the proposal, a chat message, something else?
2. Does tracking state per requirement (not per change) match how you think about specs, or is it overkill?
3. Anything in the OpenSpec workflow you'd expect a tool like this to respect and that I might be breaking?

One caveat: the app is in Spanish for now (I'm based in Spain and started with Spanish-speaking teams). It's free during early access: https://atalayahq.io — and the SDD walkthrough is here: https://atalayahq.io/para/sdd/

Thanks for OpenSpec — it's the piece that made working with agents feel predictable.