Ritual

Ritual for developers

Give your coding agent better context.

Ritual is the layer that improves what goes into your coding agent—turning what you want to build into a deeply reasoned build brief it can execute.

What Ritual fixes

A second set of eyes before your agent builds.

Give Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, and other coding agents the structured context they need before they build, to catch blindspots, clarify scope, and reduce rework.

Accumulating Tech Debt
Context Drift
Wasted Token Burn
Unresolved Trade-offs
Flawed Assumptions
Weak Reasoning

What better context changes

The same task produces a very different build

A prompt leaves important decisions unstated. Ritual resolves them before your coding agent starts.

TaskAdd real-time collaboration to our editor

Pull request
Changes requested agent/realtime-collab → main

Add real-time collaboration #412

The agent filled in the blanks

  • Interprets "real-time" as polling every two seconds
  • Overwrites local work with the latest remote version
  • Re-renders the editor after every poll

Files changed (9) +412 −168

  • src/editor/Editor.tsx+96 −41
  • src/editor/useDocument.ts+74 −38
  • src/editor/sync/poll.ts+88 −0
  • src/editor/sync/merge.ts+52 −0
  • src/api/documents.ts+39 −27
  • src/api/routes/documents.ts+31 −19
  • src/state/editorStore.ts+18 −30
  • src/editor/Toolbar.tsx+9 −8
  • src/editor/__tests__/Editor.test.tsx+5 −5

Review · Last-write-wins will lose edits. Nine files touched for an approach nobody chose. Expect rework.

Pull request
Ready to merge agent/realtime-collab → main

Add presence and soft locks to the editor #412

Decisions resolved in the brief

  • Start with presence, not simultaneous co-editing
  • Preserve single-writer editing and prevent lost work
  • Make the rollout reversible

What the agent built

  • Adds live cursors
  • Uses soft locks
  • Places full co-editing behind a beta flag

Files changed (5) +190 −12

  • src/editor/Presence.tsx+68 −0
  • src/editor/useSoftLock.ts+54 −0
  • src/editor/Editor.tsx+31 −6
  • src/api/routes/presence.ts+29 −0
  • src/flags.ts+8 −6

Review · Smaller, safer, reviewable. Five files, no destructive path, and the risky part is behind a flag.

How Ritual works

Every stage of the AI-native SDLC, grounded in your build brief

Ritual runs structured discovery first—surfacing and resolving questions that matter. That reasoning becomes a build brief and stays with your agent through intent, plan, build, test, and deploy.

Define the problem

Your one-liner becomes a sharp, scoped problem statement your agent can build against.

Break it into sub-problems

Each sub-problem gets the discovery questions that pin its trade-offs, dependencies, and edge cases.

Reason into recommendations

A first cut of recommendations with the reasoning attached: not just what to do, but why.

INTENT FILE
# Problem statement
## Sub-problems (3)
## Recommendations
> why: trade-offs, deps, edge cases
RITUAL IN THE LOOP

Ritual writes intent.md from the discovery above: problem, sub-problems, recommendations with the reasoning. Your agent plans from it, not from your prompt.

Requirements

Each recommendation becomes a requirement with its constraints and dependencies stated.

Acceptance criteria

Every requirement gets the checks that prove it shipped, written before any code exists.

Ground the brief in your code

Every code reference in the brief is resolved against the real codebase. Anything that doesn’t match is flagged before it becomes a requirement.

BUILD BRIEF
## Requirements R1–R6
## Acceptance criteria
- [ ] R1: given / when / then
- [ ] R2: given / when / then
RITUAL IN THE LOOP

Requirements and acceptance criteria land in the build brief, grounded in your repo and committed next to your code, so design decisions have history.

Requirements checklist

The checks the coding agent must satisfy before the build merges. Read first; missing items block review.

Goal and non-goals

One sentence stating the outcome, and what the agent must not build this round.

Required outcomes

Testable results the build is measured against.

CODE
feat(schema): add User.role
test(auth): role gating
feat(api): refund endpoint
docs: update AGENTS.md
RITUAL IN THE LOOP

Your agent implements from Ritual’s brief, in order, one commit per outcome. The checklist decides what counts as done.

Audit the requirements

Checks that every constraint you set still shows up in the recs and requirements, with acceptance criteria that enforce it.

Audit the plan

The agent’s plan is checked against the brief for anti-goal violations, scope creep, and skipped decisions. Findings come with a repair.

Verify with a second model

Audits run on a different model family than the one that did the work, so the plan isn’t grading its own homework.

AUDIT CHAIN
audit_recs · 6/7 upheld
! grounding · 2 unresolved
audit_plan · 0 violations
needs repair · 1/3
RITUAL IN THE LOOP

Every finding and repair is logged to the audit chain, so you can see what Ritual caught before any code was written.

CI/CD

Acceptance criteria from the brief run as the pipeline’s checks, so the build is measured against what was agreed.

Create PR

The PR description is generated from the brief: goal, non-goals, and the checklist with each item’s status.

Code review

Agentic review works through the checklist first. Human review is routed to the files the audit flagged.

MERGED PR
ci · 12/12 acceptance checks
checklist · 6/6 satisfied
! human review · payments/
merged
RITUAL IN THE LOOP

The brief travels with the PR: acceptance criteria run in CI, the checklist is the review rubric, and humans review only what the audit flagged.

"The context window becomes the new programming surface. You are no longer only writing deterministic instructions for a computer. You are giving context to an intelligent interpreter that can read, reason, call tools, inspect environments, debug errors, and adapt."
Andrej Karpathy
Andrej Karpathy
Founder, Eureka Labs · ex-Tesla, OpenAI

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