---
title: Stages
description: Six state machines. The model produces content; the machine decides the transition.
---

A stage is a state machine the harness runs. A model may produce content — a contract, a plan, a vote, a
review, an alert triage — but the machine reads that content and decides the transition. That is what makes a
run reproducible: the same state produces the same decision, and the event log says which path it took.

## The six

| Stage | From → to |
|---|---|
| `plan` | objective → interview → PRD → design → vote → issues, with two human gates |
| `tick` | queue → contract → (plan → vote) → dispatch into a worktree |
| `deliver` | PR → checks → verify → review → definition of done → merge |
| `observe` | events and state → anomalies → a scheduler exit code |
| `release` | batch → human approval bound to a head sha → promote → deploy → smoke → rollback |
| `intake` / `maintain` | alerts and checks → tracked issues, deduplicated by fingerprint |

## How a stage runs

Each stage runs inside its scheduler's precheck command and exits 1, so the run is recorded without launching
an agent session. `observe` is the exception, and deliberately so: its exit code *is* the decision — 0 means a
human has to look.

<Mermaid chart={`stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> queued
    queued --> contracted: orchestrator freezes the contract
    contracted --> escalated: blocking ambiguity
    contracted --> planned: plan approved (2 of 3)
    planned --> dispatched: worktree + terminal + brief
    dispatched --> in_review: PR opened
    in_review --> fix_round: CI red, review findings, or a missing artifact
    fix_round --> in_review: the worker pushes again
    in_review --> merged: both DoD lists proven
    in_review --> blocked: fix rounds exhausted
    merged --> [*]
    escalated --> [*]
    blocked --> [*]`} />

## Every transition is an event

`LOOP_EVENT_TYPES` names every event the loop emits and the fields it carries, and the compiler accepts
nothing else. An event whose name exists only inside a template string is an event nobody can subscribe to on
purpose — so the vocabulary is the contract that plugins, notification channels and this documentation all
read.

Which phases run at all is the flow's decision: `worker.roles` declares the ordered phases of an issue, and
`flows.profiles.<name>.stages` switches them per flow. A project that never opted in keeps every phase
answering from its own block, which is exactly what it already had.