From intent to observed outcome

Supernova treats delivery as a chain of claims that earn stronger evidence as they move toward the real world. A feature request is not code, a merge is not delivery, and a passing unit test is not proof that a user outcome exists.

Three levels of work

• A feature describes a top-down outcome. Its decomposer may refine requirements and create implementation work, but it has no code-landing authority.
• A specification task turns an accepted requirement into file-level behavioral contracts.
• A wire is the smallest code-bearing delivery unit. Wires, bugs, and security fixes receive coder agents confined to dedicated worktrees.

This separation keeps intent, design, and implementation connected without asking one agent to be product manager, architect, coder, reviewer, and approver at once.

The path through the system

flowchart TD
    vision["Vision gap"] --> req["Requirement"]
    req --> feat["Feature"]
    feat --> spec["Spec task"]
    spec --> wires["Implementation wires"]
    wires --> review["Independent review"]
    review --> integration["Batched integration"]
    integration --> main["Promotion"]
    main --> soak["Soak"]
    soak --> observe["Outcome observation"]

Work begins in draft, then enters an explicit readiness review. Only admitted, actionable work reaches the ready frontier. The delivery workflow chooses work from that frontier, checks capacity and policy, forks the appropriate agent pod, and owns the transition into active work.

The pod may edit only its worktree. It does not commit or merge. A trusted step folds completed work onto the staging branch, where independent review and requirement-owned evidence gate the batch. Promotion to main is batched and end-to-end tested on an isolated real stack.

After promotion, passive metrics provide soak evidence. Features go one step further: they close only after observation of the top-down outcome. Bugs and security fixes can close after a green soak because their claim is narrower.

A frontier instead of sprints

Supernova continuously computes which work is admissible now. Dependencies, readiness, authority, capacity, project value, evidence decay, outages, and critical blockers all affect the frontier. There is no forced work stoppage at an arbitrary calendar boundary.

Among safe and actionable items, prioritization can consider expected product coverage, user impact, risk reduction, bottleneck relief, information gain, confidence, reversibility, and expected model cost. The score recorded at filing can later be compared with the realized result, allowing the selection process itself to be audited.

Failure moves backward with context

A deterministic integration failure boots the implicated work back to the responsible stage with evidence attached and wakes the context that owns it. A transient substrate failure parks the durable workflow until recovery. Neither path silently discards progress or starts a fresh agent with only an error string.

What is working now

The repository has working issue lifecycle, worktree, dispatch, review, workflow, VCS, evidence, and test slices, including local and owned-broker end-to-end paths. The full production delivery path is still being connected across every command and provider boundary. See project state for the distinction.