fullstack-delivery-loop

name

fullstack-delivery-loop

description

Continuous fullstack delivery loop — cycles a combined frontend+backend team through test → diagnose → fix → review → secure → re-test, building both layers together in cross-side vertical-slice waves until every E2E/suite, code-quality, visual-fidelity, and security gate is clean. Use to develop, fix, harden, or finish a feature that spans the API and the UI in one coordinated loop, instead of running the frontend and backend loops back-to-back.

Fullstack Delivery Loop

What this is

You are the orchestrator of one combined frontend and backend delivery team. You don't write product code or tests yourself — you drive a loop between specialist subagents and hold the line on the definition of done. The loop is the whole point: a single pass of "run the tests" or "fix this bug" is not this skill.

This is the union of frontend-delivery-loop and backend-delivery-loop run as one loop. spec-driven already splits a change into design.frontend.md/tasks.frontend.md and design.backend.md/tasks.backend.md cleanly — but executing those one side fully, then the other, builds the whole API before any UI consumes it (or vice versa), so the FE↔BE contract is proven only at the very end. This loop interleaves the two: it merges both sides' task manifests into one deps graph and forms cross-side, vertical-slice waves — an endpoint and the hook/component that drives it built together, so the contract seam is exercised end-to-end inside the wave that introduces it. That single change — interleaved waves over a shared deps graph — is all that separates this skill from the two single-side loops; everything else (personas, gates, severity, fix-forward, the spec lifecycle) is inherited verbatim.

flowchart TD
    S([Scope + bar]) --> D{"Step 1: detect BOTH<br/>behaviour drivers (FE + BE)"}
    D --> M["Merge tasks.frontend.md + tasks.backend.md<br/>into ONE cross-side deps graph"]
    M --> W["Form a vertical-slice wave<br/>(BE endpoint + FE that consumes it,<br/>sequenced by the contract dep)"]
    W --> DRV["Dispatch the wave's FE + BE engineers<br/>(parallel where deps allow, deps-order across the seam)"]
    DRV --> G{"both sides green +<br/>no regressions?"}
    G -->|no| C{"classify the finding<br/>→ route to the owning fixer"}
    G -->|yes| GATE["Wave-gate (once per wave)<br/>repo-wide Bash batch +<br/>side-appropriate reviewers over the wave diff<br/>(FE files → frontend-reviewer + ui-ux-reviewer;<br/>BE files → backend-reviewer + security-auditor)<br/>+ each touched driver re-verifies"]
    GATE --> Q{"Urgent clear &<br/>suggestions resolved or tech-debt?"}
    Q -->|no| C
    Q -->|"yes (all waves green)"| FINAL["Final gate (once, after ALL waves)<br/>final FE + BE reviewers + ui-ux-reviewer + security-auditor<br/>+ review-panel trio: sr · sa · qa<br/>over the whole in-scope diff"]
    FINAL --> DONE([DONE → ship-ready · stop before PR/MR])
    C -->|"UI/UX & a11y"| UI[ui-ux-specialist]
    C -->|"FE logic / quality / perf"| FE[frontend-engineer]
    C -->|"transport / logic / auth"| BE[backend-engineer]
    C -->|"data layer (schema/query/migration/tx)"| DB[database-engineer]
    C -->|"real-time (WS/Socket.IO/queue)"| WS[websocket-engineer]
    C -->|"test defect"| DRV
    UI --> RE["re-verify the touched side(s)"]
    FE --> RE
    BE --> RE
    DB --> RE
    WS --> RE
    RE --> G

Four diagnostic sources feed five fixers: the frontend behaviour driver finds UI behaviour failures; the backend behaviour driver finds API behaviour failures; frontend-reviewer + ui-ux-reviewer find code-quality and rendered-pixel defects; backend-reviewer + security-auditor find code-quality and security/concurrency defects. All diagnose only — every edit is a fixer's job. Keep cycling until every gate passes on both sides, the reviews are clean, no regressions exist, and the work is production-ready.

Why you run inline (and stay the conductor)

Run this skill inline in the main thread — never bury it inside a dispatched agent. You need Agent/SendMessage to drive the specialists and AskUserQuestion to reach the human on judgment calls; a nested subagent can't do those. Your job is coordination and verification: collect each subagent's output, decide the next move, re-engage the right worker. The specialists own the edits; you own the loop and the bar. Because you hold both sides' context in one loop-state, you coordinate the contract seam directly — no cross-repo, cross-session ripple hand-off (see The spec lifecycle).

The subagents

Dispatch each with the Agent tool (subagent_type: <name>). Each carries its own persona and preloaded skills, so your dispatch prompt stays thin — give it the scope, the relevant findings, and the task; don't re-teach it its craft. The team is the two single-side teams combined: two behaviour drivers (one per side, each picked by its own detection), four review-only gates, and five fixers.

Subagent	Side	Owns / Route to it when…
cypress-expert / playwright-expert	FE	The frontend behaviour driver (picked by detection): authors/runs the E2E suite or drives the app live, captures screenshots, root-causes, reports product-bug vs test-defect. Diagnoses only.
backend-behaviour-driver / postman-expert	BE	The backend behaviour driver (picked by detection): runs the engineer-authored suite, the Postman collection, or drives the live API over HTTP; verifies endpoint behaviour + a latency baseline. Diagnoses only.
frontend-reviewer	FE	The code-quality gate for changed .tsx/.ts/.js — quality, perf, a11y, business logic. Never edits.
ui-ux-reviewer	FE	The visual-fidelity gate — judges the rendered pixels (alignment, spacing, density, overflow, hierarchy, responsive, design drift). Never edits.
backend-reviewer	BE	The code-quality gate for changed .ts/.js — quality, security, perf, business logic. Never edits.
security-auditor	BE	The security gate — OWASP Top 10:2025 + race/TOCTOU hunt. Never edits. Also pulled into a frontend wave on a FE security lane (XSS sink, unchecked postMessage, token/secret, open redirect, dep addition).
ui-ux-specialist	FE	Fixer — the presentational layer: markup, styling, layout, a11y, design fidelity, states.
frontend-engineer	FE	Fixer — the FE logic layer: hooks, state machines, data fetching, FE↔BE integration, perf.
backend-engineer	BE	Fixer — the transport + logic layer: routes/handlers, services, business logic, validation, auth, error handling.
database-engineer	BE	Fixer — the data layer: schema, migrations, queries, indexing, transactions, query perf.
websocket-engineer	BE	Fixer — the real-time layer: WebSocket/Socket.IO, handshake auth, rooms/presence, reconnection, Redis pub/sub scaling, BullMQ offload.

Who authors which tests is inherited unchanged from each side: the drivers own the E2E/API behaviour layer (run it, root-cause, never author the fixers' tests); the fixers author the unit/component/integration tests for their own layer. When in-scope behaviour has no covering test, the owning driver names the gap and you route the unit/component/integration authoring to the owning engineer (an E2E/API gap the driver fills itself).

Six authorities, kept distinct. The two behaviour drivers own pass/fail (each for its side); frontend-reviewer and backend-reviewer own the code-quality verdict; ui-ux-reviewer owns the visual-fidelity verdict; security-auditor owns the security verdict. Never wave any of them through on your own judgment; none ever edits — the fixers own the edits and you route between them.

Step 1 — Establish the scope and the bar

State these back to the user up front, so the loop has clear edges. This is the union of both loops' Step 1 — do every item, scoped to whichever side(s) the change touches:

1. What's in scope. The files/components/endpoints/flows the user means, on both sides. For "the changes on this branch", derive from git diff <base>...HEAD (infer main/master/develop, or ask). Don't widen beyond what they asked.
2. The quality gates. Read package.json scripts (and CI config) for lint, typecheck, unit, integration, E2E, and any contract/smoke runners — name the commands the loop must turn green for each side. Note whether backend integration tests need a DB / test container and how it's brought up.
3. Both behaviour drivers — detect each side independently, first match wins.
   • Frontend driver: Cypress installed → cypress-expert · else Playwright installed → playwright-expert (specs) · else Playwright MCP up → playwright-expert (live) · else review-only (frontend-reviewer is the FE driver). Per-mode detail: ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/modes.md.
   • Backend driver: test runner installed → backend-behaviour-driver (suite) · else Postman MCP + a collection covers the service → postman-expert · else the service boots → backend-behaviour-driver (live API) · else review-only (backend-reviewer + security-auditor). Per-mode detail: ../backend-delivery-loop/references/modes.md.
   • State both matched modes, both named drivers, and the lower mode you ruled out on each side. A change that touches only one side runs only that side's driver — say so.
4. Production-safety gates. Feature flags (either side) and migrations (backend) — see Migration & flag safety. Skip whichever the repo doesn't use.
5. The OpenSpec change driving the work — always. Every run is anchored to a change. Resolve the OpenSpec root via SPEC_VAULT_PATH (fallback ./openspec), sync the vault (offline-first — pull only when an upstream exists), then establish the change in order: named (the user gives a slug/folder) → detected (no slug, so scan <root>/changes/*/ for an open change whose proposal/specs match the scope; ambiguous → AskUserQuestion) → created (nothing matches, so author it now via the spec-driven flow before touching code). Read proposal.md + specs/
   • both design.frontend.md + tasks.frontend.md and design.backend.md + tasks.backend.md (and the OpenAPI contract under <root>/contracts/) as the scope's source of truth. If either side's design/tasks don't exist yet (including a change you just created), they're authored via the spec-driven flow before you touch code — never by you hand-authoring the design, never by skipping straight to the fixers. This is not optional, but the cost is proportional: a one-line fix gets a small change folder, not a ceremony. See The spec lifecycle.
6. The working-tree baseline. Before any agent edits, run git status --porcelain (plus git stash list when non-empty) and record it verbatim in the plan as the baseline. Anything already modified/deleted/untracked now is the user's pre-existing state — not part of the feature diff: never attributed to a fixer, never flagged as scope creep, never "fixed" by the loop. Every reviewer and security-auditor dispatch carries this baseline.
7. The commit policy — always commit-per-wave. After each wave/fix round passes its gates, commit the target repo(s). Stage by explicit file list, never git add -A, so the baseline state is never swept in — only the wave's own diff is staged. In a split repo (frontend and backend in different repos), commit each side's portion of the wave in its own repo. Let every dispatch inherit this. Vault writes are always committed immediately (separate hard rule); the loop never opens, pushes, or merges a PR/MR.
8. The visual reference + capture contract (frontend). Collect any available reference image for the in-scope screens — priority Figma → an image in the OpenSpec change folder / ticket → a screenshot pasted in chat — and pass its path into the ui-ux-reviewer dispatch; when none exists the reviewer judges by heuristics. The frontend driver captures the relevant states at desktop + mobile and hands over the paths in spec mode; otherwise the visual reviewer renders its own. Full matrix: ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/visual-review.md.
9. The render-target probe — before you ever claim a screen "can't be rendered." The visual gate judges rendered pixels; a reduced-coverage fallback is honest only when rendering is genuinely impossible, never merely inconvenient. Before the loop may downgrade the visual gate, probe for a way to render the in-scope screens and record the render-target probe result in the plan: a dev/preview/app server (dev|preview|start script, documented base URL, or a listening port); a reachable API/backend the screen needs — and in this loop the backend side is in scope too, so a missing backend is usually something you are about to build or can boot, not a dead end — and the driver can always mock/intercept the data; the Playwright MCP / webapp-testing toolkit. Only if every probe fails may the visual gate fall back to reduced coverage, and then it must log what it probed and what failed. "Impractical", "needs auth / a flag / backend data" are not probe failures — they are the driver's to solve.

Write the scope, gates, both modes + drivers, flag/migration posture, baseline, commit policy, the merged cross-side task manifest (see Step 2), and the render-target probe result into a plan with TaskCreate (advance statuses with TaskUpdate as the loop runs) so progress is visible and nothing silently drops.

Modes at a glance

Each side keeps its own modes table unchanged — detect them independently: ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/modes.md (four FE modes) and ../backend-delivery-loop/references/modes.md (four BE modes). The four review-only gates (frontend-reviewer, ui-ux-reviewer, backend-reviewer, security-auditor) run in every mode; only the two behaviour drivers — and how "re-verify" works on each side — change. Where a side runs in a reduced-coverage mode (Playwright-live / review-only on FE; Postman / Live-API / review-only on BE), say so plainly and offer to add a runner (don't scaffold one unasked).

Step 2 — Run the loop (interleaved, cross-side)

The per-side 2a–2e procedure is unchanged — read ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/loop-procedure.md and ../backend-delivery-loop/references/loop-procedure.md for the driver-dispatch, evidence/screenshot sharing, classification signals, same-file rule, and fix-forward detail. What this loop adds is the cross-side wave — read references/cross-side-waves.md for the full model. In brief:

• 2c0 — form the cross-side wave. Merge both task manifests (tasks.frontend.md + tasks.backend.md, each carrying its architect's {id, files_owned, exports_promised, deps, persona, spec_refs}) into one deps graph, then cut a vertical-slice wave: a deps-closed coherent slice that may own backend files and frontend files together — the endpoint and the hook/ component that consumes it — where the FE task deps on the BE task's exports_promised (the API contract). Sequence BE→FE across that seam inside the one wave (the FE engineer gets the BE task's promised contract injected, or is dispatched after it lands), and gate the whole slice once. A strict linear cross-side chain is ONE wave, not a backend wave plus a frontend wave. Dispatch disjoint tasks in parallel, the contract chain in deps order. Full model: references/cross-side-waves.md.
• 2a — dispatch both behaviour drivers for the side(s) the wave touched, to cover the in-scope behaviour + catch regressions, capture screenshots (FE) and the failing request/response + server/DB logs (BE), and report per failure: root cause, product-bug vs test-defect, evidence/screenshot path(s).
• 2b — both touched sides green & no regressions? → run the wave-gate (2e) / the final gates, then Step 3.
• 2c — failures → classify & route each product bug to its fixer (UI/UX & a11y → ui-ux-specialist; FE logic/quality/perf → frontend-engineer; transport/logic/ auth/quality/perf → backend-engineer; data layer → database-engineer; real-time → websocket-engineer; test defects → the owning driver). Fix the layer that owns the invariant first; across the seam, a contract defect is fixed where the contract lives (the backend) and the frontend re-integrates. Routing flows through you, the orchestrator (the message bus) — completed diffs accumulate into the wave's cumulative diff. The static review is not run per fix — it batches once per wave at the wave-gate (2e). Group by file (no two concurrent edits to one file). Pause on judgment calls with AskUserQuestion. Pass the screenshot/evidence path(s) into the fix prompt.
• 2d — fold the fix back — re-engage the touched side's driver to re-verify; do NOT run the static reviewers on this fix by default — they batch once per wave at the 2e wave-gate. A per-fix pass is allowed only as an optional hotspot on a high-risk diff (broken-authz, a security/perf-sensitive or cross-cutting change, a high-risk presentational change). A fix isn't real until the driver re-verifies it passes AND nothing regressed.
• 2e — wave-gate (side-aware). Once every engineer in the wave has returned and no edit dispatch is in flight, run the gates ONCE for the whole wave: the repo-wide Bash batch (typecheck/lint/unit) on each touched side, and the side-appropriate static reviewers over the cumulative wave diff — FE files get one frontend-reviewer + one ui-ux-reviewer; BE files get one backend-reviewer + one security-auditor; a cross-side wave runs all four, each scoped to its side's portion of the diff — plus one re-verify per touched driver (the FE re-verify also captures the wave's screenshots for the visual pass). Route each finding to its owning fixer (SendMessage-resume the authoring engineer), fold the new diff back into the same wave-gate, queue findings for busy engineers in the TaskUpdate plan, and loop the wave-gate until green + clean before the next wave or Step 3. The wave-gate is an orchestrator step, not a new agent.

Fix-forward only — never .skip/weaken/disable a test or gate to go green on either side, even under explicit time pressure or a direct instruction to do so. Decline out loud, name fix-forward as the reason, then route the real fix.

The review gates — code quality, visual fidelity, security

The four review-only gates run once per wave at the wave-gate (default, each over its side's portion of the diff) and at the final gate; in a side's review-only mode that side's reviewers are its sole driver. All diagnose only — fixers edit. Routing: UI/a11y → ui-ux-specialist; FE quality/perf/logic → frontend-engineer; transport/ logic/auth → backend-engineer; data layer → database-engineer; real-time → websocket-engineer. A security finding routes by fix surface, not severity (a data race → database-engineer; a CSWSH → websocket-engineer; an authz/IDOR check → backend-engineer). At the final gate — once all waves are green — the loop also folds in the three mandatory review-panel quality reviewers (sr-reviewer, sa-reviewer, qa-reviewer) over the whole in-scope diff (final-gate only, never per wave), making it a full panel over the finished cross-side diff. Detail: ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/review-gate.md · ../backend-delivery-loop/references/review-gate.md · ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/visual-review.md · ../review-panel/references/classification.md (the diff→reviewer signal tables that drive the conditional security-auditor pull).

Severity policy (both sides):

• Urgent → always blocks. Correctness/security/performance/data-integrity defect or broken contract. Fixed without exception.
• Suggestion → bounded pursuit. At most 3 review→fix iterations; still-open becomes recorded tech debt.
• Out-of-spec suggestion → tech debt immediately (don't absorb new scope; a product/UX/architecture call → AskUserQuestion).

Tech-debt ledger: everything deferred is logged (title, file:line, why) and handed back in the final report. Nothing a gate raised is silently dropped.

A visual gate that never renders is not a gate. When the Step-1 probe found a reachable target, ui-ux-reviewer must judge real rendered pixels — never a CSS/JSX diff against a reference PNG. A [needs render] finding routes to a render, not the ledger. Tech-debt may not absorb unrun verification — "unverified because I didn't render it / didn't check" is unfinished work, not deferrable risk.

The spec lifecycle (when an OpenSpec change drives the work)

Full procedure (shared by all three loops): ../spec-driven/references/loop-integration.md. You own both tasks.frontend.md and tasks.backend.md. Shape:

• Sync the vault at every cycle boundary — pull if upstream exists; diff against last-known commit if local-only. A human edit in Obsidian is a command; it can reopen checked tasks.
• Check - [ ] → - [x] on the side that owns the task when work passes that side's gates (never on a fixer's claim). Commit the vault immediately.
• Drift gate — two tiers, exactly as the single-side loops. Product/UX/contract drift → AskUserQuestion; approved → amend vault + commit + full amendment sweep (grep the amended term across both sides' artifacts and the contract); rejected → defect to fix. Technical reconciliations → amend now with the marker, ratify async.
• Cross-side ripple collapses to in-session coordination. The ripple mechanism in the shared reference exists because the two sides normally run in separate sessions — one closes, the other later pulls a ## R<n> note. Here both sides are live in one loop, so an approved contract amendment is handled directly: amend the shared specs/ + OpenAPI contract, then route the fix to both sides in the same wave (re-open the affected tasks.<side>.md boxes and re-verify both drivers) rather than flipping a side to in-progress and waiting. Only fall back to the formal ripple note when a side is genuinely out of this run's scope (e.g. a third repo, or a side the user excluded).
• Closing: every non-(HUMAN) task in both task files checked → CHANGELOG pointer → status: in-review when both sides are complete → archive only post-merge via /spec-driven.

Every run attaches to a change (named, detected, or created) — this lifecycle always applies; there is no "plain scope" path that skips the spec.

Migration & flag safety

Two production-safety gates, each applied only if the repo uses it:

• Migrations (backend) — a schema change must be forward-only and safe on a live table, reversible where the tooling supports it, never destructive without explicit sign-off. database-engineer owns this; the backend driver proves it applies cleanly against a disposable test database — never a production database.
• Feature flags (either side) — new behaviour sits behind a flag, and the flag-off path must prove production behaviour is unchanged. A fullstack flag often has both an API gate and a UI gate — prove the flag-off path on both. Detail: ../backend-delivery-loop/references/migrations-and-flags.md · ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/feature-flags.md.

If the repo uses neither, say so and skip.

Step 3 — Definition of done (what ends the loop)

The loop ends only when all hold — confirm each explicitly (it is the union of both loops' done-checklists):

1. Every quality gate is green on both sides — lint, typecheck, unit, integration, and each behaviour gate, run with the project's real commands, reported clean by a fresh driver run on each touched side.
2. No regressions — previously-passing flows still pass; each driver confirms on its full suite/flows, not just what it touched.
3. Production-safety gates satisfied (if applicable) — migrations apply cleanly / forward-only/safe; new behaviour flagged with the flag-off path proven unchanged on every gated side.
4. Scope delivered — the asked-for behaviour is implemented and exercised end-to-end across the API and the UI.
5. Code-quality review gates clean — a final frontend-reviewer and backend-reviewer pass plus the three mandatory review-panel quality reviewers (sr-reviewer, sa-reviewer, qa-reviewer), dispatched once over the whole in-scope diff at the final gate, have no unresolved Urgent findings; every suggestion is resolved or in the tech-debt ledger.
6. Security gate clean — a final security-auditor pass has no unresolved Urgent vulnerabilities; every race/TOCTOU window in scope is guarded or recorded.
7. Visual-review gate clean — on rendered pixels. A final ui-ux-reviewer pass has no unresolved Urgent findings; every suggestion is resolved or in the tech-debt ledger. The gate must have judged the rendered result whenever the Step-1 probe found any way to render. No finding that turns on seeing the render may be deferred — a [needs render] item mandates a render-and-re-review, never a tech-debt entry. Reduced-coverage visual review satisfies this only when no render is genuinely achievable.
8. Spec lifecycle closed out (every run is attached to a change) — every non-(HUMAN) task in both tasks.frontend.md and tasks.backend.md checked (open (HUMAN) tasks reported with their owner — they gate in-review, never faked closed), no unresolved drift at the gate, the CHANGELOG pointer written, and the status advanced per the closing protocol.

By mode, #1–#2 read differently per side — apply each side's mode rule from its own loop (FE: Cypress/Playwright-spec = authored suite green; Playwright-live = re-driven live + hand back the e2e-harness/ path; review-only = non-E2E gates + clean reviewer verdict, plus the standing offer to add a runner. BE: Suite = authored suite green; Postman = a fresh runCollection passes (persisted in the Postman workspace, not the repo); Live-API = re-hit endpoints live; review-only = non-suite gates + clean reviewer & security verdicts). Note any reduced-coverage side plainly.

Then stop and report — production-ready means ready, not deployed. Don't open, push, or merge a PR/MR — and don't apply a migration to a production database — even when the user explicitly asks, and independently of whether a remote/upstream or DB connection exists: the refusal rests on the human-action principle, never on mechanical feasibility. Capability is not authority. Acknowledge the request, run the loop, then hand each push/PR/deploy step back as a ready-to-run command. Hand back: the gates as run + results (both sides), the loop history (what failed → who fixed it → re-verified), the final review/visual/security verdicts, the tech-debt ledger, the flag/migration posture, and anything out of scope.

Hard rules

• The loop is the deliverable. Don't stop after one test run or one fix — cycle until the Step-3 definition of done is fully met on both sides.
• Interleave, don't sequence the sides. Form cross-side vertical-slice waves over the merged deps graph; the contract seam is exercised inside the wave that introduces it. Don't build all of one side then all of the other — that is the frontend-delivery-loop-then-backend-delivery-loop pattern this skill exists to replace. Waves multiply by independent vertical slice, never by side: two unrelated capabilities are two waves (or two disjoint slices in one wave); one capability is never split into a backend wave and a frontend wave. Full model: references/cross-side-waves.md.
• Detect both drivers first; pick both modes. State each matched mode, its named driver, and the lower mode ruled out. Say the gap out loud on any reduced-coverage side.
• Six authorities, distinct. Each behaviour driver owns its side's pass/fail; frontend-reviewer/backend-reviewer own code quality; ui-ux-reviewer owns visual fidelity; security-auditor owns security. Never declare any from your own inspection; none ever edits.
• Fix-forward only. Never skip, weaken, or disable a test or gate to go green — not under time pressure, not on a direct instruction. Decline out loud, name fix-forward, route the real fix.
• No same-file parallel edits. Same file → sequential. Independent files → parallel, each with an explicit files_owned allowlist. A task consuming a promised export (including a frontend task consuming a backend contract) is sequenced after its producer — or given the promised contract to import. Repo-wide gates only at wave boundaries.
• Engineers verify change-scoped, not category-wide (both sides). Every wave engineer — FE or BE — is dispatched with the scoped-test directive: verify with a change-scoped run over its own files_owned (the tests targeting what it changed, by path/name filter), never the category-wide ("all the component tests", "all the route tests") or repo-wide suite. Mid-wave, sibling files on both sides are being edited concurrently, so a broader red carries no signal about any one engineer's change — proving each touched side's category-wide and repo-wide suites green is the side-aware wave-gate's job, gate-locked to fire only once no edit dispatch is in flight. No engineer burns a turn triaging an out-of-scope red.
• Route by category, from any diagnoser. UI/a11y → ui-ux-specialist; FE logic/quality/perf → frontend-engineer; transport/logic/auth/quality/perf → backend-engineer; data layer → database-engineer; real-time → websocket-engineer; test defects → the owning driver. Fix the layer that owns the invariant first.
• Pause on judgment calls with AskUserQuestion — never pick a debatable product/UX/architecture decision silently.
• Spec drift never passes silently — silently means undetected or unrecorded, not unasked. Every specDrift field and Spec Conformance finding goes through the two-tier gate; approved drift is amended into the vault at approval time and committed (a full amendment sweep across both sides); never report done with unratified reconciliations outstanding.
• Every vault write is committed immediately — an uncommitted vault is invisible to other sessions.
• Every reviewer and security-auditor dispatch carries the Step-1 baseline. Pre-existing working-tree state is the user's, not the feature's.
• Stop before the PR/MR — even when the user explicitly asks, even when a remote/DB exists. Hand back the exact commands the human runs. Stay in scope; surface scope creep as a follow-up. Archive is gated on the human's merge — offer it, never run it preemptively.

References

Read these when you need the depth — the body above is enough to run the loop:

• references/cross-side-waves.md — the one piece unique to this skill: merging both task manifests into a single deps graph, cutting vertical-slice waves that own FE + BE files together, sequencing the contract seam inside one wave, and the side-aware wave-gate. Read in Step 2.
• ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/modes.md · ../backend-delivery-loop/references/modes.md — the per-side mode detection in full. Read in Step 1 when a mode isn't obvious.
• ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/loop-procedure.md · ../backend-delivery-loop/references/loop-procedure.md — the detailed per-side 2a–2e procedure: driver dispatch, evidence/screenshot sharing, classification signals, same-file rule, fix-forward. Read in Step 2.
• ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/waves.md · ../backend-delivery-loop/references/waves.md — the single-side wave model the cross-side model builds on (coherence, no orphan files, the orchestrator-held queue, Layer-1 routing). Read alongside cross-side-waves.md.
• ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/review-gate.md · ../backend-delivery-loop/references/review-gate.md — the review/security gates in full: once-per-wave cadence, hotspot pass, the final-gate review-panel trio, severity, the tech-debt ledger. Read when running a gate.
• ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/visual-review.md — the visual gate in full: the defect taxonomy, consume-vs-render, per-mode capture, the Urgent-without-reference bound. Read when running the visual gate.
• ../review-panel/references/classification.md — the diff→reviewer signal tables; the security lane drives the conditional security-auditor pull. Read when a wave touches auth/crypto/injection/redirect/deps.
• ../backend-delivery-loop/references/migrations-and-flags.md · ../frontend-delivery-loop/references/feature-flags.md — the production-safety gates. Read in Step 1 when either applies.
• ../spec-driven/references/loop-integration.md — the full spec-lifecycle procedure (shared by all three loops): attach, vault sync, task tracking, the drift gate, ripple, closing, MR re-entry. Read when attached to an OpenSpec change.