The Pipeline
Six stages from PRD to production. Every stage has a token budget. Every agent has a role. Nothing is hand-wavy.
01
Intake
Token budget assigned- PRD arrives via form or direct submission
- Phil Jackson (Orchestrator) reads and scopes the project
- Token budget calculated based on complexity tier
- Project workspace created, tasks generated in TASKS.md
02
Debate
Max 10% of token budget- Steve Jobs stakes design/brand position
- Elon Musk stakes engineering/feasibility position
- 2 rounds maximum — disagreement is productive, not wasteful
- Phil logs locked decisions. No revisiting settled questions.
03
Plan
Included in debate budget- Directors define sub-agent teams and assignments
- Each agent gets: inputs, outputs, token allocation, quality bar
- Parallel tasks identified for maximum throughput
- Build plan committed to project workspace
04
Build
60% of token budget- Sub-agents execute in parallel on feature branches
- Directors monitor for drift and intervene when needed
- Token burn tracked in real-time against budget
- All code goes through PRs — no direct pushes to main
05
Review
20% of token budget- Margaret Hamilton runs automated QA pipeline
- Build verification, accessibility audit, security scan
- P0 = block ship. P1 = fix before deploy. P2 = backlog.
- Revisions loop back to Build (costs revision tokens)
06
Deploy
Included in review budget- Push to Emdash staging environment
- Smoke test on staging — verify all pages render
- Promote to production
- Git tag the release. Client notified. Done.
Token Budget Breakdown
10%
Strategy
(Debate + Plan)
60%
Build
(Parallel agents)
20%
QA + Deploy
(Non-negotiable)
Plus a 10% reserve for unexpected rework. Unused reserve is returned.