Core Concepts
The foundational ideas behind Gangsta — the hierarchy, the pipeline, the laws, and the philosophy.
Core Concepts
Gangsta is built on six foundational concepts that work together to create disciplined, structured AI-assisted development:
- The Borgata Hierarchy — The organizational metaphor that structures who does what: Don, Consigliere, Underboss, Capo, Soldier, and The Ledger.
- The Heist Pipeline — The 6-phase development cycle that every feature goes through: Reconnaissance → The Grilling → The Sit-Down → Resource Development → The Hit → Laundering.
- Omerta — The Five Laws — The governance rules that prevent chaos: no direct agent-to-agent communication, checkpoint everything, cite sources, track budgets, spec is law.
- Intent Routing — How user intent maps to skill invocation. When you say "build this," the framework knows to start a Heist. When you say "debug this," it knows to use interrogation-debugging.
- The Ledger — Institutional memory: insights from successes, fails from mistakes, and accumulated constitution rules that persist across sessions.
- Spec-Driven Development — The philosophy at the core: spec is law, code is implementation. Never code without a spec. The Heist cycle enforces this.
Start here: If you're new to Gangsta, read these concepts in order. They build on each other — the hierarchy defines the roles, the pipeline defines the process, the laws govern the process, and the spec philosophy justifies it all.