# AceLM Architecture & Lifecycle Documentation

Welcome to the technical documentation for AceLM (Agentic Coding Environment with Lifecycle Management).

AceLM brings professional engineering discipline to coding agents: defined requirements and architecture, evidence of work and quality, documented decisions, continuity for collaboration, and visibility into progress and resources. Experienced developers remain at the helm. AceLM is in development; capabilities still in design are identified explicitly.

# Decision Precedence & Maturity

The documentation in this portal reflects the latest confirmed design decisions for AceLM. Detailed reconciliation notes, confirmed invariants, and open proposals are tracked in the Design Decisions & Alignment Record.

The documentation follows this precedence:

1. Authoritative sources: Artifact Transition Catalog and Status Vocabulary & Terminal UX, including their explicit maturity boundaries.
2. Downstream rules: lifecycle, metadata, isolation, assessment, and website references defer to those sources.
3. Evidence register: alignment record reports corrections and checks; it does not create authority or finalize proposals.

Finalized Run/readiness semantics apply now; favored common lifecycle names await explicit adoption under the status migration contract.

# Core Documentation Index

# 1. Overview & Architecture

• Design Decisions & Alignment Record: Evidence register, decision precedence, and scoped verification status across the design documentation suite.
• Product Positioning: The five pillars of professional engineering discipline for coding agents.
• Engineering Rigor & Delivery Controls: Evidence across the SDLC, durable decisions, collaboration, and planned resource reporting and configurable policy.
• Status Vocabulary & Terminal UX: Unified status vocabulary, 8-character compact terminal displays, phase retention rules, and Run/Readiness dimensions.
• Common Artifact Metadata: P0-P7 priorities, state-qualified dependencies, action readiness, and stable open question IDs.

# 2. Lifecycles & State Machines

• Lifecycle Rules & State Machines: Specification, Backlog, Plan, and Release Candidate lifecycles, adversarial review gates, and explicit failure dispositions.
• Artifact Transitions & Gate Remediation Catalog: Comprehensive transition contract (R01-R15, S01-S06, P01-P13, B01-B16, X01-X15, F01-F08) and 40 gate failure remediation cases (G01-G40).
• Plan Items & E/V Contracts: Execution items (E-*) vs. Verification items (V-*), mapping rules, and evidence verification gates.
• Workspace Isolation & Worktree Policy: Git branch isolation, isolated worktree allocation, single-writer leases, and daemon process durability.

# 3. Release Governance & Assessments

• Gated Release Lifecycle: Release candidate definitions, candidate pinning, release gates, separate assessment verdict and action readiness, and post-release verification.
• Sequential Release Assessment Cycle: Multi-pass evaluation algorithm (Pass 1 deep, Pass 2 light, Pass 3 convergence) and per-lens remediation inner loops.
• 31-Lens Assessment Catalog: Complete catalog of 31 engineering lenses across Security, Reliability, Architecture, Performance, UX, and Compliance.

# 4. Research

Research about other products, the market, and how agent tools communicate with models lives in the

private acelm-research repository. Documents here cite

it by path. Material that moved there on 2026-10-11:

• the OpenCode and Hermes Agent execution-flow analysis (docs/opencode-hermes-…-execution-flow.md) → agent-tools/findings/
• docs/cursor-info/ → competitors/cursor/
• docs/architecture-evaluations/acelm-client-interface-strategy.researched.md and its research prompt → market/

# Visual Diagrams & Architectural Panels

# Historical Baseline Lifecycle Panels

These preserved assets are historical shorthand, not the full current contract. Direct accepted-to-done arrows still require actual execution, evidence, and independent verification. Plan states do not define set states. The authoritative catalog and detailed diagrams govern all gates.

• Specification Lifecycle (SVG)
• Plan Lifecycle (SVG)
• Backlog Item Lifecycle (SVG)
• Artifact Origins & Graduation (SVG)
• Shared Transitions (SVG)

# Detailed State Machine Diagrams

# Core Architectural Invariants

1. Persistent Git Records: All specifications, plans, decisions, and verification records travel with the Git repository.
2. Execution Never Implies Verification: Fulfilling an E-* task does not satisfy a V-* requirement. Verification requires independent observation and reproducible test output.
3. Adversarial Independence: Reviewing and verification tasks are performed in isolated agent contexts separate from authoring and execution sessions.
4. Human Acceptance Authority: Agents propose; authorized humans accept. Release authorization is strictly bounded to concrete candidate revisions and target environments.