Lite path quickstart

The lite path is AID’s fast lane for small, well-scoped changes. Instead of five separate human-gated phases, it collapses the same ground — Describe through Detail — into one fast, mostly-autonomous pass.

Two ways in

There is no routing step inside another skill — you enter the lite path directly:

• Name your change with a shortcut. If you already know what you’re changing, invoke the matching verb-first shortcut directly: /aid-fix for a bug, /aid-create-api for a new endpoint, /aid-change-ui for a UI change, and so on. Each shortcut is a thin doorway into the shared shortcut engine.
• Ask /aid-triage when you’re not sure. Describe your change in one free-form sentence. /aid-triage infers the work type and scope, then suggests either the matching shortcut or, for broad / multi-activity / ambiguous work, the full path (/aid-describe). /aid-triage is stateless and write-free — it suggests one next step and stops; it never runs the change itself and creates no work folder.

/aid-describe no longer triages. It is a full-path-only skill — every invocation proceeds through the full six-phase pipeline described in Your first work.

The shortcut engine

Every shortcut delegates to the same shared engine, which runs:

INTAKE → CAPTURE → SPEC → PLAN → DETAIL → GATE → APPROVAL-HALT

It collapses the five definition phases (Describe → Define → Specify → Plan → Detail) into one run — it never skips a phase, it collapses the information capture within each. CAPTURE, SPEC, PLAN, and DETAIL run autonomously, without a per-phase human checkpoint (unlike the full path’s Propose → Discuss → Write → Review loop in each phase). The only interactive moments are an occasional CAPTURE gap-question and the terminal approval halt. GATE grades every document the engine produces mechanically against your project’s minimum grade before halting.

The engine never executes — /aid-execute is a separate, user-initiated run after you approve. Each shortcut invocation allocates a brand-new work-NNN; there is no cross-session resume.

The lite path flow

1. Invoke a shortcut — or ask /aid-triage first if you’re unsure.

   /aid-fix

   (or /aid-create-api, /aid-change-config, … — whichever shortcut matches your change). Describe what you want in a sentence or two.

2. Answer the rare gap-question, if asked.

   The engine captures your change autonomously. It only stops mid-run to ask when it hits a genuine information gap it cannot infer on its own.

3. Review at the approval halt.

   The engine writes the full flattened artifact set — REQUIREMENTS.md, SPEC.md, PLAN.md, BLUEPRINT.md, and the task files under tasks/ — grades every document at GATE, then halts for your approval. Review the set and approve.

4. Execute.

   /aid-execute

   The agent implements the task(s) directly, grades its own output, and loops until it passes your acceptance criteria. Review each output and approve.

What a lite work item looks like on disk

The lite path produces a flattened work item: a single implicit delivery, with no deliveries/ folder and no delivery-001/ folder.

.aid/
  work-NNN-name/
    STATE.md          # work lifecycle, with the sole delivery's gate + Q&A promoted into it
    REQUIREMENTS.md
    SPEC.md
    PLAN.md
    BLUEPRINT.md      # the single delivery's definition, at the work root
    tasks/
      task-NNN/
        DETAIL.md      # task definition — the flattened path has NO per-task STATE.md;
                       #   each task's cells live in the work-root STATE.md § ### Tasks lifecycle

Compare this to the full path’s nested deliveries/delivery-NNN/ structure, covered in Your first work.

Lite path vs full path

| | Lite path | Full path | |—|-----------|-----------| | Entry | A shortcut (/aid-fix, /aid-create-api, …), or a /aid-triage suggestion | /aid-describe | | Best for | Small, low-risk, well-bounded work | Complex, high-risk, or poorly understood work | | Phases | One collapsed, mostly-autonomous engine run (Describe → Detail) | Discover → Describe → Define → Specify → Plan → Detail → Execute | | Artifacts | Flattened: REQUIREMENTS.md, SPEC.md, PLAN.md, BLUEPRINT.md, tasks/task-NNN/DETAIL.md | Nested: REQUIREMENTS.md, per-feature SPEC.md, PLAN.md, deliveries/delivery-NNN/BLUEPRINT.md, deliveries/delivery-NNN/tasks/task-NNN/DETAIL.md | | Gates | Terminal approval halt (plus rare gap-questions) | One per phase |

The lite path is not a shortcut that skips quality — it is proportionate rigour. /aid-triage is conservative: anything short of one confident single-match routes you to the full path instead.

Next steps

• Your first work — the full-path walkthrough for complex changes.
• Methodology — the complete phase philosophy and when each entry point fits.