The End-to-End Lifecycle
This page is where the previous nine chain together — from an owner stating what they want, to something running live in front of real users, with two separate human approval gates standing between the two.
Every box in this diagram is one of the previous nine pages. Nothing here is a new mechanism — it's the same pieces, in the order they actually run.
Walking the chain
Vision. The owner states what they want — concretely enough to derive a checkable definition of done from, not so vague that any outcome could be argued to satisfy it.
Plan. Enough research and scoping to commit to a concrete approach and a stated Definition of Done, then a choice between the phased path or the autonomous loop path — a judgment call about how much per-step human review this particular piece of work is worth.
Implement. Whichever path was chosen, the actual work runs inside the five-phase loop shape, at whichever tier fits how long it needs to run and what it needs access to.
Quality gates. The output has to clear the fixed automated bar — type checking, linting, tests, coverage — before it's even eligible to be reviewed for the next step. A failure here sends the work back to implementation, not forward with a lowered bar.
The Git Gate. Passing quality gates makes a change eligible to be committed and pushed to the shared repository — but doesn't commit it. That's a separate, named human approval, every time, by default.
The Deploy Gate. Being committed and pushed is its own fact, separate from being live. Getting something in front of real users is a second, independently-approved gate — approving the first never implies approving the second.
The App. The abstracted live deployment target this whole chain exists to serve — the one box on this page deliberately left generic. What's real and current here is the process that gets something there; what runs inside that box is a different subject.
What "done" actually means
A change being written is not the same fact as it being committed. Being committed is not the same fact as being pushed. Being pushed is not the same fact as being live. Each of those is checked and stated separately — never assumed from the one before it.