The agentic delivery pipeline, task to PR

Definition

A delivery pipeline is the path a change takes from request to merge. An agentic one puts language-model roles on most of that path, with people approving at the points that matter. The order is fixed, so every change leaves the same trail.

The steps in DevFlow

1. You create a task and start planning; DevFlow adds a git worktree on a new branch.
2. Planning checks for an AGENTS.md file, explores the code and may ask questions.
3. You approve the plan, or reject it with feedback.
4. A task creator splits the plan into subtasks.
5. The implementer writes code; the verifier runs the configured tests and an AI review.
6. A summarizer writes the summary, PR description and changelog, and the work moves to review.
7. You mark it done: commits are squashed, the branch is pushed and the pull request opens.

Why the order is fixed

Decomposition is consolidated and capped at 8 subtasks. If that role exceeds it, the split fails instead of truncating the plan. Review happens as one pass at the end, over the whole branch.

The process fails fast. When a subtask fails, everything stops and the worktree stays on disk for inspection.

Automatic retries cover three narrow cases only. They are an implementer run that produced no changes, a transient provider error such as a rate limit, and one repair of malformed JSON output.

What you see

Every agent action is written to an append-only event log. Status and assignee changes go to a separate history, with the actor who made them.

When a gate has no test command, the timeline records that it was skipped rather than passed.