concepts
How pipemason thinks
Five ideas you only need to learn once. The whole CLI and dashboard sit on top of these — once they click, everything else is just configuration.
The vocabulary
Runs
The atomic unit. One feature ticket → one branch → one PR. A run moves through a 14-phase pipeline (audit → plan → implement → review → ship) and writes everything to .pipeline/.
Programs
A coordinated set of runs. The planning phase decomposes a system intent into a DAG of stories that get dispatched in dependency order. Use programs when 'a feature' is actually a whole system.
Stories
The unit a program decomposes into. Each story becomes a run (with its own branch and PR) that the orchestrator dispatches when its dependencies are met.
Modes
Programs pick one of four modes — greenfield-system, greenfield-mobile, brownfield-upgrade, brownfield-extension — which determines which phases run and what artifacts they produce.
Phases
The discrete states a run (or program) moves through. Each phase has an input artifact, an output artifact, and a gate that decides whether it advances.
State machine
The formal rules of advance / retry / escalate / abort. Both the per-story and the program-level machines, with every transition and gate enumerated.
The story in one paragraph
You type pipemason start with a ticket. The runner pairs to the cloud, freezes a spec, writes a roadmap, then walks each story through audit → plan → implement → review → ship. Every phase writes a frozen artifact to .pipeline/ so the next phase (and you, and reviewers, and re-runs) can read exactly what was decided. The cloud control plane streams state to the dashboard so you can watch live and intervene when an agent escalates.