A solo builder says the issue-to-PR factory skips design, and that agent sessions still lack memory of past decisions

Azam says he has shipped almost a dozen products in two years and works through four stations: a Linear issue that must state why the work is being done and what done looks like, a design step in Paper where the agent drafts through MCP and he reviews, a coding agent (mostly Codex, he says) that builds against both, and his own review of the result against his intent. His claim is that most software-factory descriptions leave design out, and that "code is cheap now" while deciding what to build is not.

The part most useful to a harness builder is the gap he says remains open. Each agent session gets the issue and the design, but not why an earlier flow was pulled, what analytics showed after a page changed, or why earlier screens were discarded. He calls for persistent memory for product decisions and says nobody has solved it well.

This is one practitioner describing his own workflow. The post gives no measurements of defects, time or cost.

Why it matters: The issue template he describes, why plus what done looks like, is a cheap spec gate you can adopt today. His missing-memory complaint is a builder reporting, from product work rather than a benchmark, that new agent sessions start without the history behind earlier decisions.