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How pdlc-skills Shows Project Status, Change Impact, and Quality Trends

pdlc-skills offers three visibility horizons: current project status, feature impact before a change, and retrospective trends. Each depends on accurate records in the project’s state files.
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pdlc-skills makes three views of project work visible: what stage recorded work has reached, which features a proposed change may affect, and how a recent period of work went. Its statusline and /pdlc-status show current progress, /pdlc-relate maps feature relationships, and /pdlc-retro summarizes recorded trends. All three depend on the project’s state files; they do not independently verify that those records match the code or current reality.

Where are we now? Current status

The statusline presents a feature name alongside a six-stage track: PRD, design, TDD, implementation, review, and ship. It highlights the current stage and shows the next step, whether the run is autonomous or manual, and how long the feature has remained in that stage. In autonomous mode, it displays check results by default. The fixed track indicates lifecycle stages rather than a step count, which matters because a bug fix may take a shorter route than a feature.

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When work is blocked, the statusline changes to make the need for a human decision visible. It is a compact signal, not a decision-maker: the person responsible still has to determine how to resolve the block.

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Use /pdlc-status for the wider view

The command-line /pdlc-status view lists in-progress work, completed work, and suggested tasks. If a relation index exists, it can also show a feature relation tree. It may compare apparent review completion with the changelog and Git tags, and its --stale option tabulates how long features have been sitting. These checks can help a team spot discrepancies or unattended work, but the command surfaces issues for people to assess rather than deciding the project’s state on their behalf.

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What might a change touch? Feature impact

/pdlc-relate represents relationships among features. It supports four directed relation types—extends, depends_on, supersedes, and resolves—and two symmetric types: conflicts_with and relates_to. The resulting graph can help trace direct impact, impact one hop farther away, and historical nodes retained for audit context.

Its validation operation checks for dangling references, self-references, cycles, contradictory pairs, and symmetric relationships that have not been paired correctly. Those checks help reveal structural problems in the recorded graph; they do not establish that every real dependency has been recorded.

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Use the graph to think through change control

Suppose reviewed downstream work extends an earlier feature. Changing that earlier feature in place could make the downstream review no longer describe the feature as it now exists. In the workflow described by kanfu-panda, the author’s advice is to represent a new feature as superseding the old one. That is a practical approach for preserving historical context in this system, not a universal software-engineering rule.

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How did this stretch go? Retrospective trends

/pdlc-retro uses a 30-day lookback by default and writes a monthly report. It aggregates delivered features, self-check pass rates by stage, median stage duration, and sticking points. It can also report anomalies and indicate when there is no data rather than implying a result where records are absent.

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The figures below are examples from one project run described by kanfu-panda in 2026. They are not product-wide benchmarks, independently audited measurements, or expected results for another team.

Example self-check pass rates

Stage Reported pass rate
Requirements 100%
Design 100%
TDD 100%
Implementation 93.8%
Review 54.9%

In that project run, review’s lower rate was interpreted in context: review includes items requiring human judgment, after earlier stages have settled what can be machine-checked. A pass rate is therefore not a simple ranking of stage quality; what a check measures, and what it leaves to a person, matters.

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Example median stage durations

Stage Reported median
Requirements 0.0 hours
Design 0.1 hours
TDD 0.6 hours
Implementation 0.9 hours
Review 5.0 hours

These durations are wall-clock intervals between stage timestamps, including overnight time, not estimates of hands-on effort. A displayed median is only as meaningful as the timestamps and history behind it.

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What evidence do the views rely on?

The status, relation, and retrospective tools read records under docs/.pdlc-state/. As kanfu-panda puts it, “All three only read the state files under docs/.pdlc-state/. They don’t parse documents and they don’t guess.” The commands do not inspect source code to confirm progress, infer missing relationships, or repair incomplete history.

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  • Current status depends on state fields. A missing or outdated field can make a view incomplete or stale while still looking current.
  • Checks depend on consistent keys. The article notes older tests_green keys that do not match the expected tests_pass key, which can affect whether recorded check results appear as intended.
  • Durations depend on timestamps. When history lacks stage-start timestamps, duration may be derived from consecutive completion times instead.
  • Impact depends on maintained relations. Relations recorded at kickoff can become outdated as requirements change, so a clean graph is not proof that every current dependency is represented.

For that reason, treat these outputs as project-state visibility, not an independent audit. Their value comes from keeping the underlying fields, checks, timestamps, and relations current.

How pdlc-skills fits into a workflow

The repository README describes pdlc-skills as an MIT-licensed workflow for AI coding agents. It stores artifacts and feature state in the target project and organizes work through product-development stages, tests-first requirements, and self-checks. The README identifies Claude Code as its richest integration and documents adapters and differing verification status for other tools. Installation steps and compatibility can change, so consult the current pdlc-skills repository documentation for the details that apply to your agent and version.

The README also describes autonomous-loop safeguards that use command exit codes rather than model self-report, stop on failure or when work is stuck, and stop before release so a human handles shipping. Its quality-gate documentation says unmeasurable items should be reported as unmeasured rather than passing. These are design claims made by the repository, not independent test results.

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Choose the view that matches the question

Reader question Tool or view What it shows Record dependency
Where is work now? Statusline or /pdlc-status Stage, next step, blockers, completed or suggested work, and potentially stale items Feature state and status records
What could this change affect? /pdlc-relate Direct, indirect, and historical feature relationships Recorded feature relations and a relation index for the status tree
How did recent work go? /pdlc-retro Delivery, self-check rates, stage-duration medians, and sticking points over the default lookback Timestamped checks, stage history, and delivery records

Use the first view to orient the team, the relation graph before changing connected work, and the retrospective to examine patterns across a period. None can compensate for missing or stale project records; maintaining those records is part of making the views useful.

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