Engineering Methodology

This is article 6 in “Taming AI Coding Agents with TDD.” The first four covered requirements disambiguation with the GEAR protocol, tech spec guardrails, test documents before test code, and convergent review loops. Article 5 upgraded the review layer with procedural justice. This one strings everything together into a single pipeline you can actually run. The Complete Pipeline Product Design → Tech Spec → Test Plan → Test Code → Production Code ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ Ralph Loop Ralph Loop Ralph Loop Ralph Loop Ralph Loop Each stage has its own inputs, outputs, and review rules: ...

in “Taming AI Coding Agents with TDD.” The first covered test-driven requirements anchoring, the second introduced the GEAR protocol for disambiguation, the third laid out what the tech spec must nail down. This one covers the last line of defense: review. The Problem the Tech Spec Cannot Solve Article 3 ended with an uncomfortable admission. The PRD locks down “what to build.” The tech spec locks down “how to build it.” Together they compress the AI’s improvisation space down to implementation details. That is a huge improvement. ...

in the “Taming AI Coding Agents with TDD” series. The first covered test-driven requirements anchoring, the second covered the GEAR protocol for requirements disambiguation. This one fills the gap between them: after the PRD is done, what must the tech spec cover? Requirements Locked, Code Still Wrong Before the second Aristotle refactor, I spent two full days writing requirements. Following the structured approach from the previous article, I captured every acceptance criterion, boundary condition, error path, and platform constraint[1]. The AI consumed the document, passed all 37 static assertions plus end-to-end tests. The codebase was split into four files by responsibility. Information flow was switched from push to pull. ...

in the “Taming AI Coding Agents with TDD” series. The first article covered requirement anchoring at the test layer[1]. Tests assume clear requirements. This one goes upstream — to the practice of disambiguating requirements before a single line of code gets written. The v1 Lesson: One-Line Requirement, 371 Lines of Pollution Aristotle v1 had no GEAR protocol[2]. No role separation. The entire reflection feature lived in a single 371-line SKILL.md. The requirement was roughly one sentence: the system should detect when a user corrects an AI mistake, then generate a reusable rule. ...

This is the first article in the series “Taming AI Coding Agents with TDD.” The series has one thesis: AI-assisted development demands stricter process discipline than traditional development, and here is exactly how to enforce it at every step. The series follows the pipeline order — requirements, design, testing, review, implementation. This article starts at the testing layer. During Aristotle’s third refactoring, the test plan document was where I learned the hardest lesson. I’ll cover this layer first, then work backward and forward in subsequent posts. ...