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pdlc-skills makes project work visible across three time horizons: its statusline and /pdlc-status show where recorded work stands now; /pdlc-relate maps what a proposed change may affect; and /pdlc-retro summarizes recent delivery and quality records. These views can help teams spot blockers, dependencies, and recurring slowdowns—but they reflect the records maintained in the project, not an independent inspection of its code or current reality.
Where are we now? Current status
The statusline presents a feature name alongside a fixed six-stage track: PRD, design, TDD, implementation, review, and ship. It highlights the current stage and can show the next step, whether the run is autonomous or manual, check results by default for autonomous mode, and how long the feature has remained in its current stage. A fixed track gives context without implying every kind of work follows the same number of steps; for example, a bug fix may take a shorter path. When work is blocked, the line changes to make the need for a human decision visible. These are descriptions of the workflow in kanfu-panda’s September 12, 2026 article.
The command-line view, /pdlc-status, reads the same project data and lists in-progress work, completed work, and suggested tasks. If an index exists, it can also show a relation tree. The article describes checks that may compare apparent review completion with the changelog and Git tags, as well as a --stale option that tabulates how long features have sat. This is a visibility and decision-support view: it can surface issues for a person to assess, but it does not decide what the project should do.
What does changing this touch? Impact before a change
/pdlc-relate represents links among features in a graph. It supports four directed relationship types—extends, depends_on, supersedes, and resolves—and two symmetric types, conflicts_with and relates_to. The view can distinguish direct impact from indirect impact one hop farther away, while retaining historical nodes for audit context. Its validation operation checks for dangling references, self-references, cycles, contradictory pairs, and symmetric relations that have not been paired correctly. The relationship model and its described uses are covered in the DEV Community article.
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That graph is useful when a change could alter the assumptions behind reviewed downstream work. The article’s author advises that, where downstream work extends an earlier feature, changing the earlier feature in place may undermine what that downstream review meant; the workflow example is to create a new feature that supersedes the old one. Treat this as the author’s change-control advice for that scenario, not a universal rule for every project.
How did this stretch go? Retrospective trends
/pdlc-retro uses a 30-day lookback by default and writes a monthly report. It aggregates delivered features, self-check pass rates by stage, median time in each stage, and sticking points. The figures below are examples from one project run described by kanfu-panda in 2026, not product-wide benchmarks or independently audited results.
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| Measure | Stage | Example result |
|---|---|---|
| Self-check pass rate | Requirements | 100% |
| Self-check pass rate | Design | 100% |
| Self-check pass rate | TDD | 100% |
| Self-check pass rate | Implementation | 93.8% |
| Self-check pass rate | Review | 54.9% |
| Median stage duration | Requirements | 0.0 hours |
| Median stage duration | Design | 0.1 hours |
| Median stage duration | TDD | 0.6 hours |
| Median stage duration | Implementation | 0.9 hours |
| Median stage duration | Review | 5.0 hours |
In that run, the author contextualizes the lower review pass rate by noting that review includes work requiring human judgment, after earlier stages have settled what can be machine-checked. The reported review duration is elapsed wall-clock time between stage timestamps, including overnight hours; it is not a measure of hands-on effort. Both qualifications matter when interpreting a report: a lower rate or longer duration is a prompt to investigate the underlying work, not a standalone quality verdict.
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The status, relation, and retrospective views read state records under docs/.pdlc-state/. As the article puts it, “All three only read the state files under docs/.pdlc-state/. They don’t parse documents and they don’t guess.” That means a view can be orderly and still be incomplete or stale if its inputs are. The commands do not inspect code independently, repair missing history, or confirm that recorded project state matches what happened.
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- Checks must use the expected fields. The article describes older
tests_greenkeys that do not match the expectedtests_passkey, which can leave a check absent from the view. - Duration depends on timestamps. When stage-start timestamps are missing from history, duration may be inferred from consecutive completion times instead.
- Relations need maintenance. A relation recorded at kickoff can become outdated as requirements change, making an impact graph less reliable.
Useful visibility therefore depends on keeping state fields, timestamps, checks, and feature relationships accurate as work evolves. A missing or stale record is not evidence that the underlying task is healthy, complete, or unaffected.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How pdlc-skills fits into a workflow
The pdlc-skills repository describes an MIT-licensed workflow for AI coding agents that stores artifacts and feature state in the target project and organizes work into product-development stages, with tests-first requirements and self-checks. Its README identifies Claude Code as its richest integration and documents adapters and differing verification status for other platforms. Because installation and compatibility details can change, consult the repository’s current documentation for the supported setup that applies to your environment.
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The repository also describes an autonomous loop that uses command exit codes rather than model self-report, includes fail-stop and stuck-stop behavior, and stops before release so a human handles shipping. Its quality-gate documentation says items that cannot be measured should be reported as unmeasured rather than passing. These are project design claims in the README, not independently verified performance results. In practical terms, the three visibility views help organize evidence and prompt decisions; they do not replace human ownership of release or judgment about whether the evidence is trustworthy.
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