Solo SDLC

Ship Features Solo. Ship Them Right.

A structured, AI-native development pipeline for solo product builders. Human judgment at every gate. Agentic automation everywhere else.

  • ⚙️7-phase pipeline with gate checks at every stage
  • 🤖Purpose-built for Claude Code & Claude Chat
  • 🧑‍💻You decide. Agents execute. Nothing ships without your approval.
  • 🚀Merge a PR and walk away — zero-touch deployment

How It Works

Four steps from idea to production.

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1

Install the Toolkit

Download the tarball. Run the installer. Skills, hooks, and CLAUDE.md are set up in your repo.

💬
2

Describe What You Want

Open a GitHub Issue or tell Claude what to build. Phase 0 shapes it into a scoped problem brief.

3

Let the Pipeline Run

Agents handle architecture, planning, coding, testing, and deployment. You review at each gate.

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4

Ship & Learn

Code merges, deploys automatically, and the retro captures what to improve next time.

Seven Phases, One Pipeline

Each phase has a clear purpose, defined outputs, and a gate check before moving forward.

0

Discovery

Challenge assumptions, define success criteria, set scope boundaries.

1

Architecture

Read the codebase, produce a Technical Design Document that fits what exists.

2

Planning

Decompose the design into small, verifiable code prompts with failure recovery.

3

Build

Execute prompts, write code, run checks, commit — all automated.

4

Verification

Type checks, lint, tests, security review. Bugs die before they ship.

5

Ship

Merge the PR and walk away. Deployment is zero-touch.

6

Retrospective

Identify patterns, improve the process. Your pipeline gets smarter every cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be a senior developer to use this?

No. Solo SDLC is designed for any developer who ships features alone — whether you're a solo founder, indie hacker, or side-project builder. The pipeline guides you through professional-grade practices without needing a team.

What AI models does it work with?

Solo SDLC is built for Claude Code (Anthropic's CLI agent) and Claude Chat. The skills and prompts are optimized for Claude's capabilities. Other models are not officially supported.

How is this different from just using Claude Code directly?

Claude Code is powerful, but it doesn't enforce structure. Solo SDLC adds a 7-phase pipeline with gate checks, artifact tracking, compliance rules, and retrospectives — so you get repeatable, production-quality results instead of ad-hoc prompting.

Does it work with any tech stack?

The pipeline is stack-agnostic — the phases and skills work with any codebase. The default scaffold uses Next.js, TypeScript, and Vercel, but you can adapt it to your stack.

Is it free?

Yes. Solo SDLC is free to download and use. You'll need your own Claude API access (via Claude Code) for the AI-powered phases.

How do I get updates?

Run the built-in upgrader: sdlc.sh upgrade. It pulls the latest version and updates your skills and hooks in place.