Squad Pipeline

Squad pipeline

A disciplined story pipeline. One backlog item becomes one story; that story walks an ordered list of stages; each stage is a subagent that owns exactly one artifact and one concern. Three stages produce artifacts a human approves before work continues. All state is files under .squad/ in the target repository.

The main session is the squad leader: it routes, holds gates, merges, and talks to the human. It never writes a product artifact itself.

When each part applies

• Stage order, profiles, gate semantics, isolation — read references/pipeline.md.
• On-disk layout, config.json, state.json, approval records, the story packet — read references/state.md.
• Which agent writes what, and the invariants all of them share — read references/roles.md.

Read the reference that answers the question at hand rather than all three.

The shape in one pass

backlog item  ──Start──▶  story ──▶ analyst ──[plan gate]──▶ gherkin-writer
     │                                                             │
     │                                                      [gherkin gate]
     │                                                             ▼
     └── other items are non-goals            implementer ──▶ cleaner ──▶ architect

That is the default four-pack. two-pack drops everything but implementer and cleaner; six-pack adds qa-procedure-writer, code-reviewer, hardener, qa-runner and senior-implementer.

Rules that decide most questions

• One item, one story. Nothing in the pipeline decomposes a document into stories. Slicing is the operator's job, done by squad-backlog before anything starts.
• Agents do not spawn agents. Every result returns to the main session, which decides the next move.
• Reviewers do not edit. code-reviewer and architect emit recommendations; hardener and senior-implementer apply them.
• Gates belong to humans. A subagent never records an approval.
• Verify honestly. Any stage touching executable code runs the project's test command and reports the real result, including failures.
• This story alone. Neighbouring backlog items are non-goals and mocked ports, never assumed to exist.

Entry points