FastPDLC 0.2.0 — evidence records and the agent-built lifecycle

pip install fastpdlc now gets you 0.2.0. build and validate are untouched: same two dependencies, same absence of network access, same job. Everything below is additive.

The agent-built lifecycle

pip install 'fastpdlc[agents]'
fastpdlc orchestrate FEAT-refunds

A station line runs over one artifact: Understand → Disambiguate → Design → Develop → Test → adversarial Verify, with a bounded repair loop.

Control flow is ordinary code and reasoning happens inside a station. That split is the whole design: a pipeline where steps depend on each other, fan-out where they do not, and a barrier only for synthesis. Nothing about the wiring is left to a model to remember.

Four critics, each trying to refute

Verify runs four lenses in parallel — correctness, coverage, security, reproduce — each defaulting to refuted unless convinced. The agent that built the change never grades it.

--cross-provider adds a fifth verdict from a non-Claude model. A critic drawn from the builder's own family can share its blind spots, which is exactly the failure mode adversarial review is supposed to catch. Without OPENROUTER_API_KEY the lens is skipped and the run is identical to native-only; if the call fails it abstains rather than blocking. One unreachable critic must never become an outage.

Minor findings deliberately do not block. A gate that fires on nitpicks trains people to bypass it, and a bypassed gate is worse than none.

The human gate blocks

Plain-English acceptance criteria hide enormous ambiguity. "Refund window: 30 days" says nothing about whether the clock starts at authorization, settlement or delivery — nor about partial refunds, chargebacks, or what happens when the ledger write fails.

So Disambiguate runs before Design and stops the line. Building the wrong thing correctly is the expensive failure.

A blocking human gate cannot live inside one autonomous run, so it is two-phase by construction. Run one writes the open questions and exits:

{
  "status": "pending",
  "questions": [
    { "id": "q1", "dimension": "refund window start",
      "question": "From authorization, settlement or delivery?", "answer": "" }
  ]
}

A person fills in each answer. Run two reads them and proceeds.

Writing code

Develop is the only station that needs tools, so it runs a bounded loop with three: list, read, write. Confined to the project root, with containment checked after path resolution — so .., absolute paths and symlink escapes are refused rather than sanitised. No shell, no network, no delete, no rename.

--write is opt-in. By default the station proposes a diff and touches nothing, because the thing holding those tools is a model. Run it on a clean branch.

What the line cannot do

It cannot merge. The terminal state is a report; every station past the gate is deterministic or human by construction, and a test asserts it. It also cannot run tests — Develop has no shell — so a passing test report is a claim your CI still has to check. That split is arguably correct, but it should be stated rather than discovered.

Evidence records

fastpdlc evidence -o build/evidence.json

What was checked, when, on which commit, with what result. Every artifact, the config and the bundle carry a SHA-256, so the record is verified by recomputing digests rather than by trusting whoever produced it — a stronger property than a signature here, since a signature proves who made a claim and a digest proves the claim is true.

There is deliberately no --since. Historical evidence is a checkout away: bundles are byte-stable, so git checkout <sha> && fastpdlc evidence reproduces the same digests. Walking history inside the tool would only have hidden the property that makes the whole thing work.

One fix worth naming

YAML parses an unquoted date: 2026-02-04 into a datetime.date, which json.dumps cannot serialize. Any project with a date field hit this. Bundles now emit ISO-8601 strings.

It was found by using the tool on this blog, which is itself a product-as-code collection — ids matching filenames, categories from an allowed set, every related link resolving. The post you are reading had to pass the gate to exist.