Feature Cycle — Development skill for Claude Code

feature-cycle

**In plain terms:** When someone builds a new piece of software with help from an AI assistant, the work often slips through the cracks. It gets finished but never saved, done but never shared, or left half-broken and forgotten. This is a checklist the AI follows so that doesn't happen. It makes sure every piece of work gets thought through, actually finished, saved, tested, and handed off before moving on. Think of the routine a good contractor follows so a renovation gets finished and signed off, instead of a half-painted room nobody comes back to. This is that, for building software.

The rest of this page explains what it is and exactly how it works, then how to install it. You don't need to already know the tools to follow along.

What am I looking at?

This is a **skill for AI coding agents** like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini CLI, the tools that write code alongside you. A skill is just a set of written instructions the agent reads and follows. You don't run it like an app or type a command for it. You install it once, then work the way you normally would, and when you start building a new feature the agent notices and quietly follows the process described here.

The process has a name: the **feature cycle**. It is a start-to-finish routine for building one feature and making sure it actually ships. Thought through, built, tested, saved, and handed off, instead of getting lost halfway.

The problem it fixes

Most software doesn't fail because someone planned it badly. It fails in quieter ways:

• The work gets finished but never saved, so it vanishes the next time the code is reset.
• It gets merged into the main project but nobody is told, so the person who asked for it thinks it was never done.
• It sits in a side copy that looks finished but was never actually run, so it's broken and no one notices until the demo.

These failures are boring, and they are expensive. The feature cycle is built to make each on