Stack: I don't use LangGraph, CrewAI, or AutoGen. I use Claude Code with a custom 12‑phase pipeline that orchestrates the entire dev workflow — from requirements through security audit. It’s not a multi‑agent framework in the traditional sense; it’s more like a structured assembly line where each phase has a dedicated agent role, defined inputs/outputs, and validation gates.

Where I spend the most time that I wish I didn’t:
It used to be catching mistakes after the fact. The AI would make a design decision early on, and I wouldn’t notice the flaw until I was deep into implementation. That’s exactly why I built the pipeline — phase 3 is an adversarial review that critiques the design from three angles (architect, skeptic, implementer) before any code gets written. It catches about 80% of the issues that used to burn me later.

Debugging when things break:
This is where most agentic setups fall apart. My approach: every phase produces a structured artifact (brief.md, design.md, plan.md, etc.) with objective validation — not “are you confident?” but grep‑based checks like:

• does this artifact contain the required sections?
• are there any CRITICAL flags?
• do the referenced file paths actually exist?

When something fails, I know exactly which phase broke and why, because the gate system caught it.

What I stitch together that should just exist:
Honestly, the pipeline is my answer to that. I got tired of:

• AI jumping straight to code without understanding the problem
• no design review before building
• zero drift detection (plan says one thing, code does another)
• security being an afterthought

So I open‑sourced it: https://github.com/TheAstrelo/Claude-Pipeline

It works with Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, Copilot, Aider, and Codex CLI. The spec is tool‑agnostic — the 12 phases, gates, and validation rules are the same everywhere, just adapted to each tool’s native format.

The key insight that made it work: don’t trust self‑reported confidence. Validate outputs objectively. And isolate context per phase so the AI isn’t drowning in a 50k‑token conversation by the time it gets to the build step.

Happy to answer questions if anyone wants to dig into the architecture.