Small Feature Ship Workflow

A reusable workflow for shipping small product or engineering features with minimal human coordination and clear agent ownership.

This workflow is optimized for small, bounded changes where the goal is to avoid process overhead while still protecting product judgment, implementation quality, and release safety.

How to Use

When a user makes a small feature/change request in chat, treat this workflow as the operating procedure and execute s001 → s004 in the same chat session. Intermediate artifacts (decision brief, adversarial review prompt, Codex verdict) live in the chat context — no external persistence needed. The final deliverable returned to the user in chat is the PR URL.

Role Map

Role	Assignee	Responsibility
Feature Owner	human	Owns intent, final judgment, and shipping decision.
Decision Challenger	Claude Code	Challenges whether the feature should be built, whether the proposed solution is the right one, and what the real problem is.
Builder	Claude Code	Implements the agreed solution, opens the PR.
Reviewer	Codex (preferred) / Claude Code (fallback)	Adversarially reviews the PR. Codex owns the verdict when available; otherwise Claude Code performs the same adversarial review against its own work.
Shipper	human	Reviews the PR, merges/releases, and observes early results.

Core Loop

Decide → Build → Check → Ship

Four steps. Each step has a clear owner, with explicit handoff artifacts so the next owner can proceed without ambiguity.

Operating Principle

Do not move forward simply because a feature request exists. The first step must pressure-test the request — but right-size the scrutiny to the change. A variable rename does not deserve a 9-point brief; a behavior change with user impact does. The Decide step defines what "enough scrutiny" looks like for each tier.