plan

To create an architecture plan with deterministic guardrails, draft the Architecture section first and iterate until human-confirmed. The process enforces spec-driven DAE checkpoints, runs handoff and branch hygiene gates, and validates Charter compliance with mandatory amendment ADRs for deviations.

Spec-driven architecture planning is the process of drafting a validated design from feature specs before any code is written. You need it when you want to prevent AI agents from rushing into implementation and ensure engineers remain in charge of performance-sensitive tradeoffs.

You enforce charter compliance during architecture planning by running a structured Charter Check against CHARTER.md. This deterministic gate requires matching amendment evidence and ADRs for any deviations found during the checkpoint validation process.

Yes, you need acceptance criteria and specs before drafting an architecture plan. The planning process requires feature.md, acs.md, spec.md, and CHARTER.md as inputs to enforce prior checkpoint completeness and generate a validation-method-aware test strategy.

The best way to validate architecture checkpoints is by running deterministic dae_handoff.py and dae_branch.py gates. These scripts enforce pipeline breadcrumb completeness and resolve the methodology via dae_resolve.py before generating the final plan.md.

Architecture planning requires resolving methodology via dae_resolve.py to ensure deterministic guardrails are properly applied. This gate enforces prior checkpoint completeness and guarantees the generated plan.md aligns with the spec-driven DAE pipeline before implementation begins.