Explanation¶

Understanding-oriented background. These pages cover why chris-code is shaped the way it is — the design decisions and trade-offs behind the pipeline and the gates.

• The pipeline — why design comes before code, the split between design-open and determined work, and the shared change engine.
• Coherent change — why a working change can still be wrong, how the coherent implementation is discovered rather than invented, and how that coherence is preserved when a change fans out across parallel tasks.
• The assurance model — what the review gates actually prove (and what they don't), and why intent is checked separately from conformance.
• Context & dispatch — the balance between offloading work to subagents and keeping context in the session, and why the brief must carry intent.
• Execution mechanics — how subagent-driven-development stays lean and recoverable: staged parallelism, file handoffs, the progress ledger, reviewer integrity.
• Relationship to superpowers — what chris-code inherited from its parent project and where it diverged.

For what each piece is, see the Reference; for how to use it, the how-to guides.