ACES Platform
ACES builds infrastructure in three stages, with a human in the loop at the one stage that cannot be undone.
Spec First, Code Second
Every build starts as a specification, not a line of code.
- Stage 1
requirements.md
States what the system must do, in plain language, before any design choice is made.
- Stage 2
design.md
Records the architecture decisions, the trade-offs considered, and the reasoning for each one, so the decision is auditable later, not just the output.
- Stage 3
tasks.md
Breaks the design into discrete, reviewable units of work that an agent or an engineer executes one at a time.
Code is generated last, from an already-reviewed spec. This is why we call it Spec-Driven Engineering, not AI-assisted coding.
The Zero-Trust Human-in-the-Loop Circuit Breaker
Agentic IaC still builds toward human judgment, not around it. Every irreversible action, a change that cannot be undone by a later pull request, stops at a named human approval gate before it executes. Nothing self-approves.
This is not a generic “review before merge” step. It is a named circuit breaker tied to the specific action that cannot be undone — for example deleting a production credential, revoking an account's root access, or destroying a resource with no backup path. That gate shows the human reviewer exactly what is irreversible and why, before it happens, not after.
e.g. delete a credential, revoke an account's root access, or destroy a resource with no backup path.
The gate shows the reviewer exactly what is irreversible and why, before it happens, not after. Nothing self-approves.