Core concepts

There are only a few words you need, and they nest neatly.

An organization is the account that owns everything: your projects, your team, and your plan. Credits are pooled across it, so a team shares one allowance rather than carrying separate buckets (see Plans & billing). Inside an org live projects, one per product you’re building. Each project has its own gates, artifacts, library, and memory.

A gate is one of the ten steps. Each one produces an artifact, the structured output it owns: your feature list, your database schema, your risk register. Some gates own more than one; Gate 02 owns features, functionalities, and stories together. The full set of committed artifacts is your blueprint, the product’s constitution.

Two ideas keep that blueprint honest as it grows:

Staleness. Change a gate and anything downstream that read from it is flagged stale, so nothing silently drifts out of sync. The Downstream Review is the formal pass for reconciling several at once.

Commit gates. A gate stays locked until the one before it is committed, and you can’t commit a gate that’s incomplete. Guardrails, not busywork, they’re what stop a half-finished spec from reaching your agent.

Once the spec is published it gets a version number, and your agent reads that frozen version rather than a moving target. Changing a published spec happens through Update current sprint, which batches your edits and publishes them as the next version.

On the build side, the ledger, a record in your repo’s .cubedot/ folder, tracks each functionality’s status from todo to done. The CLI writes progress back to the project, and the PM Hub turns that into a live view of what’s built, what’s verified, and where the implementation deviated from the plan.