What each stage means

An item's stage is worked out from real state: the decisions made on it, its plan or spec, its build chat and git. This page goes through the line left to right. The quoted statuses are the exact words on the item.

Ideas#

Where work enters. An idea is a title and a description, like a ticket. It arrives from the Warden inbox (+ New idea), a tracker source, or an automation, and the tile shows From: with its source.

Triage#

A read-only planner (it can read the repo, never change it) answers, for each idea:

• Verdict: accept, needs more information, reject, or duplicate.
• Lane and confidence, size (XS, S, M, L), the shape it needs (none, a plan or a spec), a suggested assurance level (L0 to L4), the kind (feature, bug, chore), plus risks and open questions.

What happens next depends on how the lane is picked (see Lanes and gates):

• A one-file change (a short ask that names exactly one existing file and isn't risky) skips triage and goes to the lightest lane.
• A confident accept takes triage's lane with no person needed. You get 20 seconds' grace: Building in Ns: change the lane to stop it.
• An unsure or rejected idea waits for you: Triage done: your call or Needs more information. Open it and choose Accept as ‹lane›, Needs info, Reject, or Run triage again.

Rejected ideas leave the line as Rejected at triage.

Shape#

The work is written down before any code: a plan for the Standard lane, a spec for the Assured lane, nothing for Express. The planner drafts it; a person approves it in Planning.

• A plan is a versioned document (v1, v2…) you can edit, comment on and approve.
• A spec has phases: Requirements (what and why, written as testable behaviour), Design (how, with the invariants that must always hold) and Tasks. Which phases are needed depends on the level: tasks only at L1; requirements and tasks at L2; all three at L3 and L4. Each phase is drafted and approved in turn.

See Specs and plans.

Build#

An agent builds the change in its own git worktree, so your checkout is untouched. There are two ways to build, set per lane:

• Sandboxed run (Express): a throwaway worktree, a kernel sandbox, and a network proxy that is the only way out. Nobody is asked anything: an action that would need your yes goes ahead only if its effect stays inside the sandbox. Anything that would reach outside (a push, a deploy, a write outside the run) is held for your review, never run. See Automated runs.
• Chat in a worktree (Standard, Assured): a normal Warden chat you can open, watch and steer. A plan is built with /implement-plan; a spec is built phase by phase, a new chat per phase.

Custom steps#

Your own stages, added with + Add a step: a skill, a workflow, a command, an agent prompt, or an adversarial review. A step can run by itself or wait for a person to run it, block the line (required) or just report (advisory), and apply only to some lanes. A step placed after Main waits for the merge.

Review#

Two checks can run here, depending on the lane:

1. Review against the original ask (on for Assured, and for any lane from L2): a fresh, read-only reviewer that never saw the build chat compares the change with the original ask and the approved plan or spec, and marks each requirement met or not. Gaps go back to the build chat automatically, up to two rounds.
2. The lane's review: by the policy engine (Express: Warden runs the assurance checks up to the lane's level, then asks your rules whether this change may proceed unattended) or by a person (Standard, Assured: Approve the change, with Review the change for the guided walkthrough and Verify for the assurance checks).

See Review, pull requests and merge.

Main#

The change reaches your default branch: merged locally, or through a pull request. An item counts as merged when the default branch contains its branch head or its pull request is merged. A squash merge done on GitHub is detected too.

After a merge, Warden removes the worktree and tidies the branch.

Staging and Production#

Environments are observed, never driven: the Factory never deploys. For each environment you define Shipped when:

The tile shows what is Now on the environment and how many commits are waiting To ship. A local merge doesn't push, so a change only reaches Staging once main reaches the remote.

Shipped#

Every stage that applies to the item is done. Shipped items stay visible for 14 days.

When something goes wrong#

• Every automatic action runs at most once per item per commit. A failure stays on the item (…failed: retry) until a person retries it. It clears when the branch moves or a later decision supersedes it.
• Every item has a chat. Double-click the row, or press Chat in the item's drawer, to talk to the agent about it.
• Other controls in the drawer: Change lane (until the build starts), Send back to the agent, Move to review as it is, Park and Unpark, Remove, and Remove and clean up (also deletes the worktree and branch).