Building DevRag: A Deterministic Runtime for AI Development

A series documenting the design and development of DevRag — a deterministic orchestration runtime for AI-assisted software engineering.

Each article explores a specific milestone: from task lifecycle models and state machines to typed orchestration contracts, Git-integrated workflows, recovery semantics, and runtime-controlled execution.

The goal is not to make agents “smarter”, but to establish the architectural boundaries that ensure their actions remain safe, auditable, and recoverable — turning experimental automation into a disciplined engineering system.

Topics covered

  • Deterministic task lifecycle
  • State machine orchestration
  • Runtime-controlled agents
  • Internal CLI contracts
  • Git backend integration
  • Recovery and escalation
  • Backend-agnostic task repositories

Articles

  1. Building an AI Development Orchestrator: Why the Runtime Comes Before the AI
  2. AI Development Orchestrator: Building the CLI Layer