DONE is not an opinion: it's a command that returned success

Every team has lived the scene: someone says “I think I’m finished,” the story is marked complete and two weeks later the bug is back in production. The problem isn’t the person — it’s the arbiter. When “done” is an opinion, it shifts with fatigue, with deadlines and with the confidence of whoever is speaking.

TriageCode starts from a hard rule: no agent, human or AI, declares a story complete by reading code. The “Done When” of each story is a list of executable commands. QA runs those commands and only approves if they all return success. The transition to complete stops being a judgment and becomes an exit code.

What changes in practice

AI accelerates writing, but it also accelerates the risk of closing as done what isn’t. With sensors as arbiters, the speed of generation doesn’t run over quality: the time gained shows up where it was always lost — in rework, in the hunt for “who touched this,” and in the meeting to decide whether it’s good enough.

Whoever implements never receives the opinion of whoever validates; they receive the output of the sensor that failed. It’s anti-contamination by design: the loop corrects itself until the command passes, with a ceiling on attempts that forces human escalation when the problem runs deeper than a tweak.

Why this is method, not bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is process that doesn’t change the outcome. Here the process IS the outcome: the same engine that helps the developer write also generates the evidence leadership uses to decide. “Done” comes to mean the same thing for everyone, because it’s the same mechanical check for everyone.