A Bolt is the unit of work in BoltOps — a 4–8 hour AI development work cycle. The Bolt Lifecycle takes it from intent to ship across six stages with AI-powered transitions and human gates where they matter.
Story points, t-shirt sizes, and 2-week sprints were designed for a world where humans wrote every line of code. A Bolt is the AI-first replacement: a contained 4–8 hour cycle where one or more AI agents (and a human reviewer) take a clear intent through to production. Fast enough that you can ship multiple per day. Big enough that it’s a real piece of work.
Sized for what an AI agent and a human can finish in a single sitting. No multi-week tickets that decay into stale context.
Every Bolt starts with a structured spec: title, priority, user stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases. Claude Assist fills in the details.
The CLAUDE.md for the project is the spec the agent is held to. Managed, versioned, and synced — not a stale file rotting in your repo.
Every Bolt moves through six stages on a Kanban board. Drag-and-drop, with AI-powered transitions and human gates at the points that matter most.
A PM (or Intent Architect) authors a structured Intent Document. Title, priority, user stories, acceptance criteria, edge cases, dependencies. Claude Assist generates the first draft from your title and project context.
Dragging the Bolt into Generate auto-dispatches a Claude Code session wired to your CLAUDE.md. Multiple Paperclip agents can work in parallel — one writes code, one writes tests, one updates docs — with budget caps and approval gates.
The verification engine runs lint, type check, test suite, security scan, and CLAUDE.md compliance. Every check must pass before the Bolt can move to Review.
A human reviewer (or external stakeholder via a Magic Link) reviews the artifact and submits severity-rated feedback. No login required for external reviewers.
Stakeholder feedback flows back into another agent loop. Most Bolts pass on the first iteration — the average is 1.3 cycles.
Shipped Bolts get coordinated into a Release Train. The Release Captain holds the scope gate. PR description, test results, and change summary are auto-generated. Merge and you’re live.
Join engineering teams that have replaced sprint ceremonies with AI-orchestrated workflows.
Get Started Free