Status: Accepted Date: 2026-05-20

Without an enforced sequence, users skip validation gates (no grill-me, no audit-code) and ship with untested assumptions. Free-form skill selection puts the orchestration burden entirely on the user. GSD’s fully prescriptive loop (no skips) is too rigid for brownfield projects.

bigpowers enforces a prescriptive 6-phase core loop — discover → elaborate → plan → build → verify → release — via orchestrate-project, with two opt-in modes:

• Standard: all gates enforced; no phase can be skipped without explicit confirmation.
• Fast-track: phases with measurable skip conditions (e.g., survey already done, coverage ≥ 95%) may be skipped with a logged rationale.
• Ad-hoc: legacy / experimental; no gate enforcement. User accepts full responsibility.

• Users can no longer silently skip elaborate-spec or validate-fix.
• Fast-track conditions are data-driven (file exists, metric threshold met) — not discretionary.
• Ad-hoc mode exists for experiments but is explicitly marked as lower-quality.
• Orchestration overhead: ~2% more tokens, ~15% more orchestrator complexity.