HGATE – Human-Guided AI-Assisted Traceable Engineering

hGATE is a manual, guided workflow for specification-driven development with an AI coding agent — domain-driven design, behavior-driven development, and test-driven development, connected by a traceability chain from spec to generated code to test to shipped change, so nothing can drift without leaving a trace.

The agent recommends and executes one specialist skill at a time. Humans confirm requirements, boundaries, plans, and every workflow transition.

Every stage traces back to an approved specification, not an improvised prompt. Generation never runs ahead of what's been agreed.

Bounded contexts (BCs) are established before behavior is written. Review checks that nothing generated implements behavior outside an approved spec.

Every stage leaves a record — spec, decision, test, shipped code — reconciled by a mandatory session-start protocol before new work continues, so nothing can drift without leaving a trace.

hgate-guide inspects your artifacts and recommends exactly one next skill — it never starts that skill or advances lifecycle state on its own.

ITERATE bc-enhancement loops back into an already-shipped BC to add a new capability slice or change existing behavior. This is the normal way a BC matures — not a bug-fix exception — and every pass still closes with a full BC review.

Already know your domain boundaries? architecture-decision-exploration handles a cross-system technical decision on its own, without repeating domain mapping.

Every guardrail below produces something you can point at, not just a convention everyone's supposed to remember.

Every non-trivial technical or domain decision gets a durable record — context, alternatives considered, and consequences — not just the decision that won.

Review flags any generated code implementing behavior that isn't traceable to an approved spec line. The agent doesn't get to quietly add scope.

Every BDD scenario is linked to a real test. No orphaned tests, no untested scenarios sitting in a spec no one implemented. A deterministic verifier (verify:bdd) checks scenario IDs against Jest tests, and a BDD-to-TDD human sign-off loop records approval. Browse any BC's scenarios directly with the built-in Gherkin viewer instead of parsing raw Markdown by eye.

A conservative triviality gate lets no-spec-impact changes — a rename, a perf tweak — skip the full pipeline. It still leaves an audit entry; it's a fast path, not a bypass.

Decisions and lifecycle status live next to the bounded context they describe, not in one global file every parallel agent collides on.

Each bounded context gets an explicit ACL at its integration points, so an external system's model can't quietly leak into yours.

Test the rules, not just the examples. Example scenarios only cover the cases someone thought of. For the business rules that must always hold, hGATE can check them across thousands of generated cases and flag any that break. Optional, and added where the risk justifies it.

A person reviews and approves the behavior examples and the business rules separately, and each approval is kept as a permanent record. Passing tests never replace that judgment.

Routine consistency checks on your specifications run automatically and report only what's wrong, with the exact file and line. The AI saves its effort for the questions that need judgment.

The project overview used by the viewer is generated from your specs, so it never goes stale or gets edited by hand. CI tells you if it falls out of date.

Every skill produces a specific, checkable artifact — never just code. Skills are split into phases with on-demand references to keep agent context small.