Part

Brakes

You might say: quality gates, release gates, backpressure, feedback loop

The gates that slow or stop a run before its change moves forward. They include deterministic checks, a separate automated review and human review, plus the risk class and merge policy that decide which of them each change must pass.

What it does

Keep accelerators from flooding the repository with changes that are hard to trust or costly to undo.

Ask

Which independent gate can stop this change, and what evidence does it require?

What to look for

1. Red or green check dots on a pull request
2. An automated review with findings separate from the author run
3. A required human approval or a blocked merge button

Parts

• Automated checks: Repeatable checks such as type checks, lint, tests, builds, security scans, and scenario tests.
• Automated review: A separate run checks a proposed change with fresh context and reports findings before human review.
• Review and rework loop: An automated review fails a pull request, a rework run fixes what the review named and pushes, and the push starts a new review.
• Human review: A person reads the diff or the changed files before the change merges.
• Risk class: A label for how much damage a change can do and how hard it is to undo.
• Merge policy: The risk classes an agent may merge on its own once the required checks and evidence pass.
• Review bottleneck: Opening the throttle makes more pull requests.

Pattern

Accelerator with a brake

Sources

1. Anthropic, Best practices for Claude Code, Give Claude a way to verify its workGive Claude a check it can run: tests, a build, a screenshot to compare.
2. Anthropic, Best practices for Claude Code, Give Claude a way to verify its workBy a second opinion: a verification subagent or a dynamic workflow that checks its own findings has a fresh model try to refute the result
3. GitHub, About protected branches, Require pull request reviews before mergingcan require that all pull requests receive a specific number of approving reviews before someone merges the pull request into a protected branch.
4. Matt Pocock, Software Factories for Real Engineers, Software Factories for Real EngineersAutomated checks, automated & human review. Slows the agent down and increases quality. … Before you can trust your agent to go fast, you need to know that the quality of work is going to be high at any speed.
5. Kent C. Dodds, You Own the Outcome: Product Engineering in the Age of AI, Shipping a feature without writing itThe agent wrote the implementation, tests, and PR. Automated gates and AI reviewers checked the work.
6. Matt Pocock, software-factory skill (pull request #1316), Start slowEvery trigger is an accelerator. Accelerators without brakes make a slop cannon.
7. Matt Pocock, AI Coding Dictionary, Automated checkAvoid: "feedback loop" / "backpressure" … both lump checks together with review.

Use it on your project

teardown-apply: hold "Brakes" (brakes) from the teardown at https://teardownatlas.com/software-factory/ against my project

Paste it into a coding agent that has the teardown skills.

An AI agent wrote this map with the teardown skill. It can contain errors: check the sources before you rely on a part. About and legal