The 12-Phase Workflow That Actually Made AI Coding Useful for Me
A practitioner's account — not a tutorial, not a sales pitch.
Quick screen: if you're writing throwaway scripts or solo prototypes, this workflow is overkill — skip to the Cons and Who This Is For sections first.
I've been using a 12-phase workflow I've refined over time — across free-context-hub, lore-weave, and a handful of private internal systems. Both public projects are built almost entirely by AI agents, with me acting as the gatekeeper — approving specs, reviewing diffs, unblocking decisions. Across all of them, the workflow has accumulated 2,500+ commits and a trail of written specs and audit logs I can still query months after the sessions that produced them.
free-context-hub is a self-hosted persistent memory and semantic search layer for AI agents — MCP server, REST API, RAG pipelines, and a full Next.js review UI. 15 development phases delivered end-to-end.
