Core concepts

Approval gates

VocxAI's agents can research, draft, and write code - but three things never happen without a human choosing to let them: no plan starts turning into code without approval, no task gets built with an unresolved decision behind it, and no pull request merges itself, ever.

Reviewing the plan first

Before any code gets written, the plan behind it has a review step built in. Repo topology (which repos are involved, and how) and architectural decisions raised while drafting the PRD start out proposed - a human has to confirm or override each one before detailed implementation tasks can even be generated. This isn't a soft suggestion: task generation is blocked while any decision is still unreviewed.

Approve for build

This is the named, central gate. It only becomes available once a PRD and specs exist, and it's the single action that turns a reviewed plan into running agent jobs - nothing before it writes any code. Clicking it queues a build job for every spec that's ready to go.

It also can't be clicked carelessly: it stays disabled while anything is still blocking build-readiness - an unconfirmed repo-topology entry, an unreviewed architectural decision, a task that failed its own grounding checks, or (if specs exist) detailed tasks that haven't been generated yet.

Task-level overrides

Sometimes a task fails an automated readiness check - the grounding behind it couldn't be verified against your actual repo. Rather than blocking the whole feature, a human can override that specific task once they've looked at it, without having to regenerate everything else in the plan.

The pull request is the final gate

Every change a build agent produces lands as a normal, reviewable pull request against your repo's default branch.

Manual tasks skip the plan-review gates

Manual tasks on the Issues board are the one deliberate exception: moving one into In Progress starts a build agent immediately, without a PRD, specs, or an architectural-decision review beforehand - that drag is effectively the approval. The pull request gate still applies afterward. It's a trade worth making for small, well-understood work, but it's worth knowing the upstream review simply isn't there for that path - reserve it for changes you'd be comfortable approving without a written plan.