Notes · 2026-09-16

Four stages, ten transitions, seven of them a person's: the release road in one file

What the free release starter says in its one YAML file, counted: stages, transitions, gates, notes required, SLAs and retry rules. What it means that the map draws exactly what the file says.

SoloINC · measured by reading the file · dataset: templates/starters/release.pipeline.yaml on 2026-09-16

A pipeline in this product is one file. The map draws it, the runtime runs it, the Desk shows the verbs it declares. The free release starter, templates/starters/release.pipeline.yaml, is 79 lines long, hand-written, and this note counts what those lines say.

The road, counted

What the file says

The four stages are Planned, Building, Verifying and Desk. Planned belongs to a person and asks one question: what ships in this release, and what does not. Building is run by the release-build workload, has five days, and produces a branch, a notes link and notes.md. Verifying is run by release-verify, needs Building to have happened, has two days, asks whether a stranger would ship this, and produces a verdict (ship, fix or shelve) and verification.md. Desk is the gate: a person, seven days, deciding on the verification document the previous stage wrote.

The ten transitions are the verbs between those boxes. Three belong to an agent: build to verify, verify to submit at the Desk, and verify back to build with a note when the verdict is fix. Seven belong to a person: start the build, shelve from the plan with a note, and at the Desk release, send back with a note, shelve with a note, hold, and release the hold. The two outcomes are released and shelved. Four transitions require a note, and every one of them is a step backward or out: nothing leaves the road or goes back down it without a reason written at the time.

Two stages carry a retry rule: Building retries twice and then parks; Verifying retries once and then parks. The policies at the bottom say what this road may touch: public and business data, no contact initiated or replied to, no money.

What "the map draws exactly what the file says" means

There is no second description of the road anywhere. The map's boxes are the stages list in file order; the arrows and the verbs offered on a box are the transitions; which actor sees a verb is its gate's kind; the Desk is the stage with gate: true. Change the file and the map changes on the next draw. Drag a stage on the map and the file changes. The same file is what the runtime reads to decide who may move an item where, so the picture, the permission and the execution cannot disagree.

That is also why the starter can stop where it does. The store submission is the Human's act, so the road ends at a Desk with everything ready and does not pretend to press submit.

Method

Every count was taken by reading templates/starters/release.pipeline.yaml on 2026-09-16: the stages list, the transitions list with each gate's kind and requires_note, the item's outcomes, and each stage's sla and on_fail. The file is short enough to check by eye.

What it does not say

One starter, and a simple one. The other starters have their own stages and verbs, and a pipeline assembled from the catalog can be much longer. Nothing here measures how long an item takes to travel it. And a count of gates is not a promise about behavior: the file says who may move what, and the runtime enforces it, but the quality of a verification is the workload's, not the road's.

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SoloINC · measured by reading the file

Stages, transitions, gates, notes, SLAs, retries and outcomes counted by reading the file. Every figure on this page is in a repository file named above, taken 2026-09-16.