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The delivery pipeline

This is the delivery pipeline: the fixed path an idea travels to become shipped software. It runs mostly at agent speed, with a human stepping in at exactly the points where human judgment is the whole value.

The shape is seven steps — Grill → Research → Prototype → Spec → Issues → Implement → Review — and two of them, Research and Prototype, are optional detours taken only when an effort actually needs them. The rest, every effort passes through.

An effort starts by being grilled: interrogated, in a live conversation, before any code exists. If a decision turns on a fact nobody's sure of, the pipeline pauses to research it against primary sources. If a decision stalls in words, it builds a throwaway prototype to react to. Once the idea is solid it's written into a spec, cut into issues — tracer-bullet tickets that are the plan, not a document about the plan — and then implemented one ticket at a time. Finally a human reviews the result and merges it, because merging is publication and the agent never merges its own work.

Each step has its own page: its entry and exit conditions, its owning skill, whether it's human-in-the-loop or agent-solo, and the reasoning behind how it works. The cross-cutting decisions — why there's no separate planning step, why each step maps to exactly one skill, where humans stay in the loop — live on the Principles & rulings page.

These pages are themselves the pipeline's first published output: grilled, specified, cut into tickets, and built through the very steps they describe.

The seven steps

Grill

HITL/grill-with-docs

Stress-test the idea before anything gets built.

Research

AFK/research

Pause the grill to pin down a fact the decision rests on.

Prototype

HITL/prototype

When words stop converging, build something cheap to react to.

Spec

AFK/to-spec

Turn the whole grill into one written spec — and agree the test seams.

Issues

AFK/to-tickets

Cut the spec into tracer-bullet tickets — the tickets are the plan.

Implement

AFK/implement

Build one ticket per session — test-first at the seams, refactor at the end.

Review

HITLhuman (review window)

The one gate the agent can't pass itself — a human reviews and merges.