I built a spec management extension with a WYSIWYG Markdown editor in a VS Code webview — lessons learned

I've been building a VS Code extension for spec management over the past 3 months (full disclosure: I'm the creator, it's called SPECLAN — free side project). The idea is that specifications need the same structure we give source code: hierarchy, types, lifecycle tracking. So the extension organizes specs as a tree of Markdown files with YAML frontmatter — goals break down into features, features into sub-features, sub-features into requirements. Each file has a status lifecycle (draft → review → approved → in-development → released) so you always know what's specced, what's being built, and what needs to change. The interesting VS Code challenge: making this usable for non-technical people. Product managers and business analysts define what to build, but they won't write raw Markdown with YAML frontmatter. So I needed a WYSIWYG editor inside a webview that round-trips cleanly to Markdown — same file in Git, two editing experiences. That editor ate about 40% of total development effort