Seven phases, four gates: the process every AI-written change went through

Yesterday I said process beat prompting. Here's the process.

Every change to ParkEase, from a one-line fix to a whole admin panel, went through the same route. It lives in one file the AI loads at the start of any ParkEase work. I called it flow.

Each phase names the skill that runs it. "Think" is brainstorming. "Build" is test-driven-development. "Verify" is verification-before-completion. A skill, as I'll explain in the next post, is a short instruction file the agent loads when the task matches. So each phase isn't a vague intention; it's specific instructions the AI follows at that moment.

Phases can scale down. A typo fix doesn't need a brainstorm. Four things never drop, whatever the size:

Phase 7 is where most AI workflows quietly fall apart, because the agent is eager to finish. So the last phase is a literal checklist: backend review, frontend review, HTTP-level API tests, frontend tests for the new code, security review, the UI audit, migration review, the four mandatory integration tests, lint and typecheck, pnpm audit, a secret scan, and updates to the learnings, test-case and decision files.

It's reported as a table with evidence per line. "I'll note it in the PR body" doesn't count. A gap written into a PR description is a gap nobody re-reads.

Two lines are there because skipping them already let a real defect through:

Any process this size decays into box-ticking. One line in my instructions does more than any phase:

When skipping a phase, say which and why. Silent skipping is how this decays into nothing.

The AI is allowed to skip. It isn't allowed to skip quietly. "Skipped the design gate: no UI changed" is fine. A missing phase with no sentence about it is a bug in the process, and I treated it like one.

The other half came later, the hard way: process costs tokens. At one point the workflow told the AI to send a separate reviewer agent per lens per task, and one task burned most of a week's usage limit. The fix wasn't dropping review. It was doing it inline and dispatching specialists only when a diff deserved it. That story gets its own post.

Next: the files that make all of this stick: SKILL.md, CLAUDE.md, and why ParkEase deliberately has no AGENTS.md.

ParkEase is a peer-to-peer parking marketplace for India, built solo with Claude Code. Code: https://github.com/Deonkar/parkease