The agentic software factory.

Five phases. One continuous loop.

The factory moves work from a vague idea to merged, documented code through five connected phases. Every handoff between phases is explicit. No command silently chains into the next; humans see and approve every transition where judgment matters.

Three rules hold the pipeline together.

Everything else in the factory follows from these. They are not preferences. They are the reason the wave-boundary quality gates almost never fail.

Decide what to build, not yet how.

The discover phase answers a single question: what does the work need to produce? Brainstorming is an interview, not a generation. Clarification asks only the non-obvious questions. The output is one reviewable document, nothing more.

Many specs collapse at the first edge case because no one asked the implicit question. The clarify phase exists to ask it. Erik Benjaminson · Sapient Technology Group

Audit before invention. Reuse before research.

/ca-plan never writes code. Step zero is a mandatory audit against existing types, components, and prior art. If reuse exists, the plan halts there. Research is spawned only for genuine gaps.

The most expensive line of code is the one that duplicates something already in the codebase. Erik Benjaminson · Sapient Technology Group

The seam between interpretation and generation.

The prose plan is for humans. The YAML is the contract. The todo files are deterministic. Splitting these stages is the difference between a reviewable plan and a wall of generated tasks no one fully read.

Where the factory actually builds.

The execute phase composes three pieces that are powerful only together. /execute-todos is the orchestrator. todo-executor is the worker. test-driven-development is the iron rail that auto-triggers under every implementation. Two independent quality filters stacked. Neither can be bypassed silently.

Computed from dependencies. Committed after each wave.

Wave 1 is every todo with no dependencies. Wave N is every todo whose dependencies were satisfied by waves 1 through N-1. npm run build && npm test must pass before each commit; agent-browser sweeps for runtime errors after the final wave.

Every todo gets three designs, scored.

The todo-executor is required to generate three alternative approaches and score each on a five-criterion rubric. The highest-scoring approach is selected with written reasoning, then implemented. The rubric isn't a suggestion; it is baked into the agent's required response format.

The design proves itself against tests before it ships.

The skill auto-triggers the moment a todo-executor begins implementation. There is no opt-in. The cycle runs Red, Verify Red, Green, Verify Green, Refactor. Each step has a verification gate.

/ce:review writes findings back as todos.

Multi-agent review across stakeholder perspectives (dev, ops, user, security, business) and scenarios (happy path, edge cases, scale, concurrency, failure modes). Conditional migration agents engage only when schema files are touched. Findings land in todos/{id}-pending-{priority}.md and feed straight back into /execute-todos. Todos are the universal currency.

The bot reviews. The factory responds.

Opening the PR triggers an automated Claude Code Review inside GitHub Actions. The bot posts severity-tagged findings as PR comments; /resolve-pr turns each one into a todo in the same format planning uses. /execute-todos then re-enters Phase 05 with those todos — identical TDD iron law, identical three-approach deliberation, identical wave commits, identical npm run build && npm test quality gate. Every comment travels the same factory rails that built the feature.

Review feedback enters the factory as todos. Same shape as planned work. Same guardrails. Same proof of passing tests before anything merges. Erik Benjaminson · Sapient Technology Group

Documentation drift has no place to hide.

/update-docs closes the learning loop. It is both a pre-PR analyze step and a post-ship sync step. A state file tracks the last point of analysis, so the agent never re-reads what hasn't changed.

Code that ships without its documentation isn't done; it is a debt the next engagement will pay. Erik Benjaminson · Sapient Technology Group

Every phase leaves a reviewable trail.

Discipline at the seams, freedom in the middle.

The factory is strict about a small number of things and permissive about everything else. The strictness is at the seams; agents have full freedom inside a phase to choose how to do the work, but no freedom to cross the boundary unannounced.