What is AID?

AID (AI Integrated Development) is a methodology and toolchain for building software with AI coding agents. It provides a disciplined, human-gated pipeline that takes an idea from first understanding all the way to delivered code — without the ad hoc drift that comes from unstructured AI-assisted work.

What problem does AID solve?

AI coding assistants are powerful but directionless on their own. Without structure:

• Agents skip the understanding step and write code against assumptions.
• Specifications change silently; nobody knows what was decided or why.
• Output is unreviewed; quality degrades over time.

AID imposes structure without bureaucracy. Each phase produces a concrete artifact. Each gate requires human approval. The pipeline never auto-advances.

The six-phase pipeline

AID organises work into five groups and six numbered phases:

1. Discover — scan the codebase; build the Knowledge Base.
2. Interview — TRIAGE routes the work: full path or lite path.
3. Specify — write a grounded spec from the Knowledge Base (full path).
4. Plan — decompose into a delivery plan with tasks (full path).
5. Detail — flesh out task-level implementation detail (full path).
6. Execute — implement, grade, and loop until done.

Brownfield projects enter at Discover. Greenfield projects skip Discover and enter at Interview. Small, well-bounded changes go straight from Interview to Execute on the lite path — same rigour, proportionate overhead.

Who is AID for?

• Developers who want consistent, traceable AI-assisted delivery without managing a complex orchestration layer themselves.
• Teams adopting AI tooling and wanting a shared methodology so agents produce predictable, reviewable output.
• Maintainers of mature codebases who need discovery before specification so AI agents don’t write against stale assumptions.

Host-tool agnostic

AID works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot CLI, and Antigravity. The core pipeline is the same regardless of which tool you use; aid add <tool> drops in the right profile for your environment.

Next steps

• Install AID — choose your channel and bootstrap in one command.
• Your first work — a guided walkthrough from install to first delivery.
• Methodology deep-dive — the full philosophy, phase guide, and lite-vs-full routing logic.