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. Tokens 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.

Finally, the ledger: a record in your repo’s .cubedot/ folder tracking each functionality’s build status. It’s how the build loop knows what’s done, and what’s next.