01
Ground
Start with what customers experience
Bring the tickets, interviews, observations, and metrics behind the change. Pathmode keeps private source material outside Git and links it to the claims it supports.
Product decisions for coding agents
Make the product calls before your agent builds.
Start with a brief or an existing proposal. Review the assumptions, define success, and give your team clear direction.
An account connects your repository and coding agent, or brings in the teammate who runs it. The preflight needs neither, and runs entirely in your browser.
Why not just Claude? Claude helps draft and build. Pathmode keeps the evidence, human decision, exact revision, and verification connected across agent runs. See the difference
One product decision
Illustrative example Interview
“I clicked twice because nothing happened.”
Support
12 reports of stalled payment feedback.
Metric
Checkout exits rise after three seconds.
intent.md
6/6 readyRecover stalled payments
Objective3 sources
Prevent shoppers abandoning checkout when payment processing stalls.
Observable outcome
Processing status appears within 300 ms and failed payments offer a safe retry.
Authorized by Maya, Product Owner · repository revision 6b76ea2
Agent builds
from the team decision
→
Merged diff checked
Implementation aligns with 2 specified outcomes
Outcome measured, 30 days after shipping
Checkout abandonment stayed unchanged. The team revisits whether payment stalls explain the drop-off.
The problem
Your agent built what the ticket said, not what the team decided.
Evidence scattered
Judgment implicit
Agent fills the gaps
One shared loop
Build from evidence. Learn from what ships.
See what supports the proposal, what you are authorizing, and how the implementation compares with the intent. What you learn comes back into what you build next.
02
Decide
Review the proposal before the build
Review the objective, outcomes, constraints, and edge cases alongside their evidence. Keep, edit, or remove suggestions in a brief draft; authorize an agent-originated proposal before implementation.
03
Build & check
Build from the decision, check the diff
Claude, Codex, or Cursor builds from the intent. With GitHub connected and the PR linked, Pathmode checks the merged diff against the spec. When the build contradicts the spec, the agent writes back a finding for the team to judge.
04
Learn
Bring the outcome back
After shipping, record what the outcomes did. A measured result becomes evidence for the next decision, and an explanation that did not hold gets revisited instead of repeated.
Why not just Claude?
Claude helps write and build. Pathmode keeps the decision and its evidence connected.
You could assemble this with Claude, Markdown, GitHub, and team process. Pathmode makes it a system instead of a ritual people must remember.
The result is a shared, evidence-backed decision that stays portable across agents and connected to the implementation record.
| Product decision | Claude alone | Shared document |  Pathmode + your agent |
|---|---|---|---|
| What carries forward | The conversation and the context you provide | A document people must keep current | An evidence-backed decision bound to a repository revision |
| Human authority | Expressed in conversation | Comments, status, or convention | Attributed authorization of the current repository revision |
| Readiness before build | Model-assisted review | A checklist, if the team remembers it | The same deterministic six-gate preflight every time |
| When the decision changes | The team explains the change again | Approvals may remain ambiguous | A changed repository revision needs fresh authorization |
| After implementation | A separate review conversation | The document is updated manually | The linked merged diff is checked against the specified outcomes |
Claude and other coding agents continue to improve. Pathmode’s role is not to limit what they can do; it is to preserve the team’s evidence and authority independently of the executor.
Human judgment stays human
One decision. Three kinds of ownership.
Everyone does not need to live in the same tool. They need to remain connected to the same decision.
Evidence owners
Research, design, support
See customer evidence survive the handoff instead of being flattened into a feature request.
Pathmode for Designers & Researchers
Judgment owners
Product and leadership
Make the trade-off explicit, review what changed, and stand behind the decision without losing its reasoning.
Pathmode for Product Managers
Repository operators
Engineers and coding agents
Build from a clear, portable intent.md with the outcome, boundaries, and verification already attached.
Pathmode for Engineering LeadersThe first useful moment
Before the agent starts, know what is missing.
Pathmode’s preflight applies six deterministic readiness checks. It does not declare the decision correct. It exposes gaps your team should resolve or consciously accept before implementation.
Try preflight in your browserWondering where those answers come from? Walk one product decision through it
checkout-timeout.md4/6 · NOT READY
Weak ticket
“Make payment retries smoother.”
× No observable outcome
× No safe retry constraint
→
Repair path
Name when status appears and what must prevent a double charge.
Same input, same verdict
Questions worth asking
What people ask first.
What does Pathmode actually do?+
Pathmode turns customer evidence and product judgment into a structured product decision. The decision lives as intent.md beside the code, while private evidence, recorded proposal authorization, and decision history stay in the connected workspace. Coding agents build from the decision. When GitHub is connected, a linked PR merge checks the real diff against the spec.
Why not just do everything in Claude?+
You can use Claude to help draft the decision and build the code. Pathmode makes the decision a shared, evidence-backed, revision-bound artifact that your team can authorize and any coding agent can read. You could assemble that workflow yourself with Claude, Markdown, GitHub, and team process; Pathmode makes it the system instead of a ritual people must remember.
Does Pathmode decide what we should build?+
No. Product judgment stays human. Pathmode makes the evidence, assumptions, outcomes, and trade-offs inspectable; its preflight flags missing or vague parts without pretending that a passing spec is automatically the right decision.
What does keeping an agent suggestion record?+
In a brief draft, agent additions stay marked until you keep, edit, or remove them. Keeping clears the suggestion marker; it does not create a permanent record of who accepted that claim. Whole-proposal authorization is separate: Pathmode records who authorized an agent-originated proposal and when. For repository-owned intents, that authorization names the exact revision.
Do developers need another tool or account?+
Not for the local workflow. The free MCP tool writes and reads intent.md in the repository and runs preflight without an account or API key. Connect a workspace when the team needs private evidence, recorded proposal authorization, shared context, and the delivery loop outside Git.
Go deeper
The thinking behind the workflow.
Three short reads on why the product decision needs its own durable place in an AI-native delivery loop.
Intent Engineering
Why Jira Tickets Fail AI Agents
Jira coordinates human work. AI coding agents treat every omission as room to guess. The ticket can stay, but the product decision needs to live with the code.
Read article
Intent Engineering
The Repo Gets the Decision
Why Pathmode moved its center of gravity into the repository, made intent.md authoritative, and narrowed the hosted product to what a file cannot do.
Read article
Intent Engineering
The First Artifact Has No Readiness Gate
Anthropic's AI-native SDLC playbook puts explicit controls around every stage after intent.md. The first artifact gets human review, but no repeatable readiness check. I built one, calibrated it against 98 examples, and put the verdict inside the file.
Read articleGive your coding agent the decision, not another guess.
An account connects the repository and the team. The preflight is free and local, and needs neither.