Day 4: The Process
Key question: How do we execute durably — and where does it still break down?
Today's ACIs
| ACI | Name | Takeaway |
|---|---|---|
| ACI-005 | Steel Threads Beat Feature Branches | Small, scoped, end-to-end work units with explicit design-before-code. Steel threads give the agent bounded context and the human verifiable milestones. |
| ACI-019 | Session Lifecycle as Missing Primitive | Coding sessions have a lifecycle: start, plan, execute, verify, finish, handoff. The handoff step is the most commonly skipped and the most expensive to omit. |
| ACI-022 | Done Means Enough, Not All | A steel thread is done when the objective is met, not when every possible improvement has been made. "Done" is a human decision. |
| ACI-021 | The Batch-Creation Antipattern | Creating 20 tasks in one planning session produces waste. Most batch-created items become stale before they are started. Plan in small batches. |
| ACI-023 | The Recovery Protocol | Structural debt accumulates through local optimisation. Recovery is a forensic, risk-classified audit — not whack-a-mole. Piecemeal fixes create more violations than they resolve. |
| ACI-026 | The Generation Trap | When code is cheap, the trap is generating more of it. Value shifts from building to judging what is worth building. The tracks are free; the taste is not. |