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Cadence

Why Cadence

Left to its own devices, Claude jumps straight to code. It skips the design, leaves plans half-done, and forgets to validate. That’s fine when you can read the diff and catch the gaps yourself. It’s a problem when you can’t.

Cadence is built for the second case.

The bet: spend more time on design, less on implementation

Section titled “The bet: spend more time on design, less on implementation”

Cadence is an AI-first workflow. The bet it makes is that with a capable model writing the code, the scarce resource is no longer typing: it’s direction. So Cadence flips where your time goes: you spend significantly more time on the front half (brainstorm → design → plan) and much less worrying about how any of it is implemented.

This is “vibe coding” made responsible. You still work by intent and feel (“I want a credit ledger that shows AWS credits per account”), but instead of letting that intent slide straight into an unreviewable pile of code, Cadence routes it through stages, each with a written artifact and an explicit gate where you decide whether to continue.

You direct judgment at the gates. The machine carries the verification load.

Why gates and readable artifacts are the whole point

Section titled “Why gates and readable artifacts are the whole point”

If you can’t read code, then “the tests pass” or “here’s the diff” isn’t trust: it’s a leap of faith. Cadence replaces the leap with two things you can evaluate:

  • Readable artifacts at every stage. Brainstorm produces a plain-English stub. Design produces a narrative you can actually follow. The plan is exact, but the design it came from speaks your language. You’re never asked to approve something you can’t understand.
  • Explicit gates between stages. Nothing advances on its own. Brainstorm stops and tells you to run design. Design stops and waits for you to say “approved.” Execute stops at the audit. Each pause is a place where your judgment (the thing you are good at) is exactly what’s needed.

The mental model is simple: you supply intent and judgment at the gates; the artifacts let you exercise that judgment without reading a single line of code.

How the trust gets built without you reading diffs

Section titled “How the trust gets built without you reading diffs”

Two stages exist specifically so you don’t have to inspect the implementation:

  • Audit checks the work against its own plan: every checkbox backed by real code, no half-finished steps, no quietly-dropped scope, no deferred TODOs smuggled in. It’s an automated reviewer that answers “did it actually do what the plan said?”
  • Validate walks the work as a user would after deploy: the manual and automated checks that confirm the thing behaves the way you wanted.

Together they carry the verification load. You judge intent at the design gate; audit and validate confirm the result matches that intent. That’s the chain that lets someone who can’t read diffs still trust what shipped.

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”