Conductor

Conductor is how Aras Peak Group builds software: an AI software delivery lifecycle that behaves like an engineering team that knows when to escalate.

Work moves through fixed stages: plan, implement, automated gates, blind tests, review, merge, document. Routine implementation runs on a fast, lower-cost model; planning, blind test-writing and review run on the most capable one. If an implementation fails its checks twice, the final attempt moves up to the stronger model, and the escalation is logged. If the builder meets a question it shouldn’t settle alone, it stops and asks.

Nothing advances on a model’s say-so. The gates are exit codes. The tests are written by a separate model that never sees the implementation, and they carry tamper evidence. The reviewer’s approval is bound to the exact commit it read, and the merge is refused if anything changed afterwards.

Anything hard to reverse, such as a database schema, an authentication design, pricing or a deploy target, is a one-way door. Adversarial critics red-team it, and the work does not start until a senior human signs the decision; the pipeline cannot sign for itself. Knowing which decisions those are, and what to ask at each one, comes from fifteen years of enterprise product judgment.

Every run writes a ledger entry: the models used, tokens, cost, time, and the commit that was reviewed and merged. Planted defects tested it against itself: it caught a payment key in a diff and blocked a package published too recently to trust.