SPECLAN v0.9.5 — A More Streamlined Experience

Six weeks after the Claude Code Plugin release, we're shipping SPECLAN v0.9.5. No new headline feature this time — instead, v0.9.5 is a release about polish. Everywhere you look inside the extension, the panels, icons, spacing, and interactions are more consistent, more predictable, and quieter in the corners where noise used to live.

A Consistent Design System Across Webviews

SPECLAN has a lot of panels. The Spec Editor, the AI Generation Wizard, the HLRD Import Assistant, the Clarification Assistant, the Swarm Panel, the Custom Implementation view, the Settings panel, the MCP Server panel, the Reorder panel, the Search view — each one grew up on its own schedule, with its own idea of what a button should look like, how a panel header should lay out, and what a "copy to clipboard" affordance should feel like.

In v0.9.5 we consolidated that into a shared component library. Every webview now draws from the same set of building blocks:

• A unified panel header with consistent title, description, and action-slot layout
• A shared copy-to-clipboard button with the same hover state, success feedback, and toast behavior everywhere
• Reusable info boxes for guidance, warnings, and prerequisites that look the same whether you see them in the Welcome view, the Settings panel, or inside an AI wizard
• A shared phase stepper for multi-step wizards so HLRD Import, Clarification, and Generation all indicate progress the same way
• Centralized status colors sourced from a single canonical definition — the color of a "draft" badge in the tree view is now guaranteed to match the color of the same status badge inside the editor or the Swarm plan

The end result is a VS Code extension that looks like one product instead of ten panels stitched together. If you've been using SPECLAN for a while, you'll probably feel the difference before you can put your finger on what changed.

A Proper Welcome Screen

New users used to land in SPECLAN with a tree view, an empty speclan/ directory, and a vague sense that something was supposed to happen next. v0.9.5 ships a real Welcome webview that greets you when you first open a project without specifications.

The Welcome screen shows you:

• Prerequisite checks — is Git available, is Node installed, is the Claude CLI logged in
• Pathway buttons — start a new spec from scratch, import an HLRD document, infer specs from an existing codebase, or open the sample project
• AI availability status — whether the extension can reach your chosen provider right now, with a clear path to fix it if it can't
• Community links — jump to the r/speclan subreddit, the documentation, or the marketplace

First-time users used to ask "okay, now what?" The Welcome screen answers that question before they have to ask it.

Clarification and Implementation Assistants Out of Experimental

The Clarification Assistant (for reviewing and improving existing specs) and the Implementation Assistant (for turning approved specs into an implementation plan Claude Code can execute) have been available behind the experimental features toggle for several releases. They've proven stable enough in real use that we're promoting both to default-on in v0.9.5. You no longer need to flip the experimental switch to reach them — they show up in the AI Workflows tree automatically.

Bug Reports Go to Reddit

Filing a bug through GitHub Issues required a GitHub account, a clear sense of where to file, and tolerance for a formal issue template. We've moved bug reporting to r/speclan — the subreddit where the rest of the community conversation already happens. Click "Report a Bug" in the Settings panel's About tab, and the extension opens a pre-filled Reddit post with your version, OS, and a structured template. No account juggling, no separate tool.

If you're already on Reddit, this is the path of least resistance. If you're not, creating a Reddit account is one click and one email away, and the same account lets you follow everyone else's bug reports and feature requests instead of watching them disappear into a silent issue tracker.

While we were there, we also added a "Leave a Like" button in the About tab that jumps straight to the VS Code Marketplace rating page. If SPECLAN is saving you time, a rating is the single most effective thing you can do to help us reach more spec-engineering-curious developers.

What Didn't Change

No AI features were added or removed. No spec format changes. No breaking changes. The Spec Editor, the AI Generation Wizard, the HLRD Import Assistant, the Codebase Inference Assistant, the MCP server, the Git-native workflow, and the Change Request lifecycle all work exactly the way they did in v0.9.3 and v0.9.4 — just with a more consistent shell around them.

Get the Update

If you already have SPECLAN installed from the VS Code Marketplace, v0.9.5 will update automatically. New to SPECLAN? Install the extension, open a terminal in VS Code, run claude login, and you're ready to go.

Your specification is your prompt. Let's keep building.