An iteration stage state machine built for stateless agent sessions. Where a human developer carries the state of a task in their head across a day, successive agent sessions do not — so lifecycle-kit externalizes it: a stage header and an evidence-stamp file record which stage a unit of work is in and prove each stage was actually entered.
Each stage is a skill a session invokes; the stage flip and its stamp ride together in one commit, and gates make skipping a stage fail the commit. The stages themselves are configuration, not code.
Vendor the lifecycle-kit/ directory into your repo and register its stage
gates in gates.list. The stage set, the header file, and the stamp file are
external configuration you point the kit at.
bash lifecycle-kit/bin/enter-stage.sh <stage> # stamp + flip, committed together
bash gate-sdk/bin/run-gate-tests.sh lifecycle-kit/gate-tests lifecycle-kit/checks
The state-machine contract — the stamp grammar, the flip-and-stamp protocol,
and the gates that enforce it — lives in the kit’s SPEC.md; its README.md
lists the mechanism. Back to the kit map.