Sdlc

A seven-stage skill pipeline for Claude Code that takes a Jira ticket in a codebase you don't know yet and gets it to a pushed branch with small, reviewable commits: intake, decide, spec, slice, build, review, ship, with four human gates and one untracked notes folder per ticket. It is assembled from what Matt Pocock, Addy Osmani, GitHub Spec Kit, obra/superpowers, Dex Horthy and Anthropic actually ship and teach, then stress-tested by four research agents — controlled productivity studies (METR, Stanford, DORA, Ambig-SWE), critics of spec-driven workflows, ten more YouTube transcripts and a hands-on technical audit that ran every git command in a throwaway repo. The verdict: the core loop holds and being asked clarifying questions has the strongest evidence, but it fails if you run the full process on every ticket, so tickets are right-sized into XS/S/M/L tracks. Slices become one commit each on the branch, the platform squash-merges the PR into one commit per ticket on main, and the full kit — eight SKILL.md files, two bundled curl scripts, two hooks, settings and a setup script — is included, ready to copy into ~/.claude/.

Running Claude Code as an autonomous agent inside a GitHub-centric SDLC rests on one discipline: GitHub is the system of record, the agent's conversation is ephemeral, and everything that must survive across pull requests lives in repo files or GitHub itself. This post walks the full issue-to-merge loop — trigger modes, the Explore→Plan→Implement→Commit cycle, cross-session context persistence via CLAUDE.md, the four distinct automated-review surfaces, and the merge gates that keep an agent that literally cannot self-approve from ever merging by fiat. It is built from a fact-checked research pass (25 claims verified, 0 refuted, overwhelmingly first-party Anthropic sources) and is deliberate about separating verified mechanics from the viral stats that did not survive verification.