TL;DR: Cronos — my open-source methodology for human-validated vibe coding — just shipped v2.1. It's the first release grounded in production evidence: four full cycles on real systems at a regulated SaaS company, and every amendment in the release cites the cycle that forced it. Here's the tour.
Five-day engineering cycles where an AI agent does the heavy implementation and humans hold the gates: a plan approved before any code (Gate 1), an independent human validation before any ship (Gate 2). v2.0 defined the loop. v2.1 fixes what production broke — and adds the layer v2.0 was missing.
The rhythm is no longer Monday–Friday. A cycle is five relative working days — D1 through D5 — starting any day; weekends and holidays the clock. A Thursday start runs Thu, Fri, Mon, Tue, Wed. Kickoff on D1, Path Sync D2, verification D4, demo + release decision D5. The fixed five-day length stays: calendar independence is not permission to stretch to six.
Why: "Monday kickoff" turned out to be a constraint with zero benefits — cycles ready on a Wednesday sat idle, and holidays broke the terminology.
Max 3 consecutive delivery cycles per person. The next week is a mandatory Technical Health Cycle — and that cycle is the scheduled owner of the debt every retro defers.
Why: Cronos blocks the implementer's calendar 100%. Chain that for a month and you get a tired, disconnected human operating your quality gates. Meanwhile, our E2E-testing gap was flagged in cycle 1, deferred in cycle 2, and still open in cycle 3 — because "Technical Health Cycle" existed in zero calendars. One rule fixes both: rest and debt repayment, same week.
Three lines, async, end of each cycle day:
Landed: row 6 green (webhook signature verification)
Next: row 7 — retry queue
Friction: none
Explicitly not a standup — no meeting, no attendance. Two jobs: keep the deep-focus human visible to their team, and act as a soft tripwire — the same Friction:
line two days running triggers a PM check-in before the hard reset trigger (4 hours in a loop) fires.
build:check && jest --runInBand
, and any suite failure with zero failing assertions is treated as a compile error.Any lesson that appears in
two consecutive retrosmust be converted into an enforced mechanism — a guardrail entry, a CI check, or a skill — in the following cycle.
Why: cycle 1's retro said, in bold, "scope your formatter." Cycle 2's team read it and ran the repo-wide formatter anyway. Written lessons don't propagate; machinery does. A twice-written lesson is a process bug.
v2.1 formalizes the AI Toolkit: a versioned repo where cycle learnings graduate into prompts/
(threshold: 1 proven use), skills/
(threshold: a recurred lesson), and knowledge/
(threshold: seen in 3 cycles — so first-cycle noise doesn't calcify into doctrine). Promotion runs only against closed cycles — and a cycle isn't closed until its retro is filled, which quietly fixes the "retro never gets written" problem too.
This also patches the theory: the efficiency model's speedup factor is now S(n) = S₀ + κ·K(n) — it grows with the toolkit's asset stock. Without the layer, K = 0 and your speedup flatlines.
Handy heuristic from the doc: if you'd write a CLI for it, it's a skill; if it's a paragraph you keep retyping into chat, it's a prompt. And stamp every saved prompt with the model you tested it on — prompt libraries rot silently as models change.
New in registry/claude-skills/cronos/
: a drop-in behavioral skill with six operating modes (Bootstrap → Mission Control → Implementation → Verification → Validation → Close), the gates enforced in-session, a failure-modes catalog distilled from the retros, and six paste-ready phase prompts.
examples/
— plan through retro, including a mid-cycle descope and a "Shipped with conditions" release.Cronos_Framework_v2.1.pdf
with a new .cursorrules
(never amend commits, never commit .env
, narrow formatting, one concept per change).→ ** github.com/OvidiuMM/cronos-framework** — MIT, release
v2.1
. The full amendment rationale with per-cycle citations is in doc/v2.1-amendments.md
v2.0 was a hypothesis. Four production cycles were the experiment. v2.1 is the revised hypothesis — and if you run it, your retros are welcome input for v2.2. What broke for you?