IMPLEMENTATION — Review, Harden, and Approve Before Merge
Phase 4 of 4 in the AI Driven Development Methodology. The agent generates the code. A human decides whether it ships — every time, at every gate.
What IMPLEMENTATION means in this methodology
IMPLEMENTATION is where a completed TASK becomes reviewed, hardened, production-quality code. The agent's output is a draft, not a delivery. This phase is the human checkpoint that turns "AI generated it" into "we shipped it" — and the two are never treated as the same thing.
A working IMPLEMENTATION review typically checks:
- Does the change actually satisfy the TASK — and stay inside its scope?
- Do tests exist, and do they pass — not just "does it look right"?
- Does it follow the project's existing conventions and architecture?
- Have security, performance, and edge cases been considered, not just the happy path?
The non-negotiable rule. Nothing merges without human review. This is what keeps AI generated code held to the same standard as human generated code — production quality is not optional, regardless of how the code was written.
What goes wrong without this gate
Treating agent output as finished work — because it compiles, or because it "looks right" — is how technical debt and silent architectural drift enter a codebase fastest. The fix is not to distrust AI agents; it is to keep the same review discipline you would apply to any other contributor's pull request.
How this looks in practice
In AAM's methodology, IMPLEMENTATION closes the loop back to the PRD: does the finished result actually satisfy the original intent and constraints? If not, that is signal for the next PRD or PLAN — not a reason to skip review next time.
Put all four phases to work
The Workflow Starter Kit bundles the PRD, PLAN, and TASK templates plus an IMPLEMENTATION-checklist.md that
matches the four checks on this page — so you can run the full methodology on your next feature, free.