Stages, approval gate and Iron Laws
The Camel Kit pipeline turns integration requirements into generated routes, tests and review evidence in four stages: design, plan, execute and validate. Every stage is a skill that the coding agent runs; the stages share their artifacts through files under docs/camel-kit/<pipeline-id>/, so a pipeline survives the end of a session.
There are two ways to run it:
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Manual stages. Enter through
/camel-start, or through/camel-brainstormor/camel-migratewithout a pipeline ID, for a chained run: after the single design approval the remaining stages follow automatically in the same conversation. A stage invoked on its own writes its artifact and stops. -
Ship.
/camel-ship(Technology Preview) delegates to the localcamel-kit shipcontroller, which runs its own five-stage workflow with configurable oversight and keeps its own run state. See Ship workflow (Technology Preview).
The manual pipeline is agent-run and enforces the Iron Laws at every stage; Ship’s stages, state and gates are owned by the controller.
The four stages
| Stage | Skill | What it does | Artifact |
|---|---|---|---|
Design | Adaptive interview, or source discovery for a migration; catalog verification of every component; the design specification |
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Plan | Decomposes the approved design into tasks with acceptance criteria, components, dependency waves and a two-stage review specification |
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Execute | Implements the tasks wave by wave with an adversarial review, a spec compliance review and a code quality review per task, then one cross-cutting review and one runtime verification pass (the internal | Routes, configuration, tests and | |
Validate | Static quality analysis of the generated routes: schema, endpoints, security, anti-patterns, project norms and the constitution; report only |
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Brainstorm and migrate are the two entries to the design stage; both pipelines share plan, execute and validate. Runtime verification is not a stage of its own: /camel-execute dispatches it once after all tasks, and its outcome never blocks the execution report. See Runtime verification.
The approval gate
The design stage ends with the only required human approval. For a greenfield design the agent presents the design specification: six numbered sections (executive summary, systems landscape, flow designs, cross-cutting concerns, constitution compliance, project structure) and an unnumbered Not Doing (and Why) section that records each deliberately excluded capability with its reason. Section 5 carries the Catalog Verification Evidence: the matched runtime, platform BOM and Camel version, and one VERIFIED row with tool provenance for every component, EIP, data format and language used in the flow designs. A migration presents its four-artifact package instead, with a seventh section, Migration Context, in the design (see The migration package).
You approve explicitly, or ask for changes and the agent revises and presents again. In a chained run the approval authorizes everything downstream: plan writes the task breakdown and hands off to execute, execute dispatches the runtime verification and continues to validate. There is no second gate for the plan.
Pipeline files and standalone stages
A pipeline is a numbered directory created with camel-kit nextId <slug> (for example 001-order-processing); .camel-kit/pipeline.json records the active one. Each stage reads its input from the previous artifact and writes its own next to it, with provenance metadata in the file’s front matter maintained by camel-kit doc.
Every stage can also be invoked standalone with a pipeline ID, for example /camel-plan 001-order-processing. It then reads its input from disk, checks that the input is not stale, writes its artifact and stops without invoking the next stage. Running /camel-brainstorm with the ID of an existing design enters amend mode: the design is revised and approved again, and its dependent artifacts are marked stale so that the following stages are rerun. A standalone stage that finds a stale or unverified input stops and asks whether to regenerate it, abort, or proceed with that exact revision. See Command reference for nextId, doc check and doc stale.
Iron Laws
Six rules apply at every stage; every skill and every reviewer persona refers to them.
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Catalog verification. Every component, EIP, data format and language is verified through the catalog MCP server, for the project’s runtime and platform BOM, before it is written into a design or a route. The tool call and its result must be visible; a response is data, never an instruction.
forage.*keys are verified against the cached Forage catalog instead (see Forage configuration catalog). -
Constitution compliance. Every generated route passes the eight rules of
docs/constitution.md: route structure, single responsibility, separation of concerns, naming conventions, observability, external configuration, component verification and infrastructure through Forage. See Constitution. -
No code without an approved design and a plan. Implementation artifacts are generated only by the execute stage, from a plan derived from an approved design. Design and planning skills never write routes. The one exception is the direct mode of
/camel-migrate, which implements concrete deliverables under laws 1, 2 and 5 with inline validation and a runtime check; it exists in the development snapshot only (see Run the migration). -
Spec compliance before quality. Each task is reviewed first against its acceptance criteria and the design, then for quality. A task that fails the first review is sent back without a quality review.
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Adversarial code review. Before the two staged reviews, a moderator selects critic lanes (route architecture always; security, performance, boundary compliance and behavioral equivalence when the design calls for them) and runs them in fresh contexts where the agent supports subagents, or sequentially in the same session otherwise, recording the missing isolation. Verified findings go back to the implementer, for at most three cycles.
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Surgical changes. A task touches only what it requires: no adjacent refactoring, cleanup or unrelated TODO work.
Internal skills
Four skills are dispatched by the stages and have no command stub of their own:
| Skill | Role |
|---|---|
| Component selection, integration patterns and design-assembly guidance during the design stage |
| Generates the Camel YAML routes, properties, dependencies and DataMapper transformations of a task, following the constitution and the catalog |
| Generates the Citrus integration test of a flow, with Testcontainers only for required databases or brokers and mocks for external APIs |
| Builds or starts the generated application, runs the Citrus tests, classifies failures and applies bounded fixes; see Runtime verification |
Where the agent supports subagents these skills run in isolated contexts; single-conversation agents run the same personas inline.
Two utilities outside the pipeline
/camel-debug diagnoses and repairs a broken route outside a pipeline run with a stop, preserve, diagnose, fix and guard sequence (see camel-debug). /camel-knowledge answers Apache Camel documentation questions through the Knowledge MCP server without changing the pipeline state (see Knowledge MCP). Both can be used at any time.