Code Production Process

Overview

A six-stage quality-gate pipeline that every non-trivial implementation passes through before being declared complete. Each stage produces a concrete artifact and must clear a defined gate before the next begins. The pipeline exists because quality must be enforced by automated gates inside the agent pipeline, not by human review after the fact. The critic operates in isolated context to prevent anchoring bias from the implementer's framing.

Trigger Conditions

Triggers when the task will produce >50 lines of source, touch >1 source file, or contains implementation verbs ("implement", "build", "refactor", "fix bug in ..."). Also triggers post-dispatch if git diff --stat shows source changes. Does NOT trigger for documentation, commit messages, config-only changes, or dependency bumps. When in doubt, trigger — a false positive costs one critic dispatch; a false negative ships broken code.

The Six Stages