What I've built and what I need: August 2026

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The headline this month was the product-side counterpart to the SDLC: a full PDLC skill set that carries an idea from discovery through measurement. August also realigned the verification skills around non-overlapping roles, added several new pipeline phases, and completed the ISO/IEC 25010 audit set. The month came to 61 commits, over 500 files changed, and 30 new skills.

What I Have Been Working On
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Shipped the PDLC pipeline. This was last month’s open need, and it is now a self-contained product development lifecycle that wraps the engineering one. It covers discovery, validation, strategy, definition, launch, and measurement, with a proceed, pivot, or kill gate at every phase. PDLC is the only slash command; the 31 phase and cross-cutting sub-skills live under skills/pdlc/skills/ and the orchestrator loads them on demand. Artifacts live under .pdlc/, mirroring the .sdlc/ conventions: a shared reference file, a PDLC_DIR fallback, a state file, and a revision mode. Definition is the seam where the product work hands the settled what and why to SDLC. Two supporting skills came with it, create-roadmap and review-roadmap, and identify-feature-opportunities generates and ranks new ideas from the code surface.

Realigned the verification skills. validate-pr, verify-pr, and review-pr had overlapping mandates, so I split them into three questions: validate-pr asks whether the change builds the right product, verify-pr asks whether the product is built right using runtime proof, and review-pr judges code craft from static reading alone. The new review-requested-prs orchestrator runs the three across the PRs waiting on me and skips any step already done for the current commit using SHA markers. analyze-test-coverage became its own skill for reporting introduced tests, change coverage, and uncovered code, and review-pr-full chains the whole review into one pass.

Added SDLC phases and artifacts. A new validate-assumptions/review-assumption-validation phase collects the assumptions made during design, runs the cheapest experiment that could invalidate each risky one, and blocks implementation when an assumption fails. create-lifecycle/review-lifecycle document how a resource’s states, transitions, and retention change over time, and create-domain-model/review-domain-model became standalone so a domain can be understood before solutioning. create-project/review-project fill the context files for a new repository, and create-question/review-question record open questions with what they block. create-cli-design settles a feature’s command surface as a companion artifact to requirements. Generated artifacts carry a session_link so a reviewer can reopen the session that produced them, create-* auto-dispatches its review-* in a subagent, and outcome files list the artifacts a phase produced. A single HTML slide deck now presents the whole SDLC family.

Completed the ISO/IEC 25010 audit set. audit-sdlc is now the coordinator for the ISO/IEC 25010 quality model, with a mapping table from each characteristic to a skill. One skill now covers each remaining characteristic: functional suitability, performance efficiency, compatibility, usability, reliability, maintainability, and portability, alongside the existing security and observability audits.

Shipped general-purpose skills. devils-advocate argues the strongest case against an idea, plan, or decision before you commit. gh-stack manages stacked pull requests. post-slack-message posts or threads a Slack message. stakeholder-announcement drafts and posts infrastructure updates to stakeholder channels. agents-section-daily-refresh runs the daily curation of the agent-maintained section of this blog. sync-articles brings a batch of articles into conformance with the writing rules. handle-pr-author-feedback (renamed from handle-pr-feedback) verifies that an author’s new commits answer your review comments.

Gated GitHub writes and reworked tooling. A should-post-to-github script now gates every GitHub content write, and the PR skills default to not posting, so a comment or merge only happens when --post is passed. SDLC worktrees moved to /tmp/sdlc/<owner>/<repo>/<issue>, and ~/.sdlc/** and /tmp/sdlc/** are pre-approved in the agent CLI so unattended runs are not stopped by a prompt. Script references moved to ~/.agents/scripts/, the audit and find skills switched from grep to ripgrep, and CLAUDE.md and .claude were replaced by AGENTS.md and .agents across the library.

Tightened conventions. create-article now requires naming the referent rather than leaving a vague it, and the 2-5 link cap on its See also sections was removed.

What I Currently Need
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I did not write this entry at the time, so I have no record of what I needed in August and am stating that plainly rather than reconstructing a list I cannot trust.

References
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agents - the skill library where the PDLC pipeline, the verification realignment, and the audit set landed.
ISO/IEC 25010 - the quality model the audit skills now map one to one.
ghx - the GitHub CLI used across the review and feedback skills.

pdlc on tomrochette.com

What I've built and what I need: August 2026

What I Have Been Working On
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What I Currently Need
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See also
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References
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pdlc on tomrochette.com

What I've built and what I need: August 2026

What I Have Been Working On #

What I Currently Need #

See also #

References #

What I Have Been Working On
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What I Currently Need
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See also
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References
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