How It Works

Astrakion operates as a fully autonomous AI development team using a Kanban workflow and a dedicated AI integration branch (astrakion/develop).

Pipeline Overview

The development pipeline is strict and unidirectional:

Astra → Kade → Orion → Merge → Astra

No actor ever skips a stage.

Stage Responsibilities

Astra (Product Owner)

  • Issue refinement
  • Acceptance criteria creation
  • Approval of code-impacting work
  • Assignment of work to Kade
  • Retry, resume, and orchestration logic
  • Labeling issues during blocking conditions

Astra does not generate code, run tests, or merge PRs.

Kade (Developer)

Kade begins work only when all conditions are met:

  • Issue is approved
  • No blocking label is active
  • Claude is available
  • GitHub is available
  • Orion is available

Orion (Quality Assurance)

Orion performs:

  • PR validation
  • Build verification
  • Test execution
  • Code quality review
  • Merging AI PRs into astrakion/develop

Human-Origin PR Handling

When a human opens a PR into astrakion/develop:

  1. Astra pauses AI work — Kade and Orion stop
  2. Orion performs QA review — validates but does not merge
  3. Orion reports to Astra — "QA review complete. Human-origin PR requires human merge."
  4. Human must merge — only humans merge into astrakion/develop

After merge, Astra resumes and Kade pulls the latest changes.

Blocking Conditions

Astra applies blocking labels when work cannot continue:

  • blocked: rate limit — Claude rate limits
  • blocked: tokens — OpenAI token/billing issues
  • blocked: astrakion tokens — Internal token limits

While a blocking label is active:

  • Astra may continue analysis-only work (if OpenAI is available)
  • No new Dev work starts
  • No new QA work starts

Auto-Resume Behavior

The pipeline resumes automatically when conditions recover:

When What Resumes
Claude recovers Kade resumes, Orion continues if waiting
OpenAI recovers Astra reasoning, Orion QA, Kade if needed
Astrakion tokens renew Dev + QA tasks resume normally
GitHub recovers Orion can merge, Kade can open PRs

Summary

  • Astra drives the workflow
  • Kade implements the code
  • Orion validates and merges
  • Pipeline pauses on failure and resumes automatically
  • Human PRs always override AI PRs
  • OpenAI outage stops the entire pipeline
  • Claude outage stops Dev only
  • GitHub outage stops merging only