Aegis Cycle — Student Software Development Companion
Aegis Cycle is a lightweight, educational VS Code extension designed specifically for college students and beginner developers. It provides an interactive sidebar chatbot companion to guide developers through a 9-Phase Governed Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), automatically enforcing documentation traceability, requirements matching, and test-driven scaffolding.
Key Features
- 9-Phase Guided Timeline Stepper
- Progresses through 9 structural development phases starting with Step 1 (Plan Composition & Scaffolding) through Step 9 (Release Notes).
- Dynamic collapsible dashboard lets you track completed and active nodes.
- Zero-UI Conversational Commands
- Drive the entire lifecycle directly within the chat interface using simple keywords:
run or start — Triggers the active phase's agent completion.approve or continue — Approves the Creator proposal, writes files to your workspace, and advances steps.reset — Resets the pipeline state.
- Multi-File Workspace Writing & Scaffolding
- Automatically scaffolds
Frontend/ and Backend/ directory hierarchies.
- Parses multi-file outputs dynamically to write and update source code files in real-time.
- Creator-Critic Double Agent Loop
- Every proposal draft generated by the Creator Agent is audited by a Red-Team Critic agent, pointing out correctness bugs, edge cases, and compliance gaps.
- Multiple AI Providers & Model Selectors
- Enter your API Keys securely via the settings panel.
- Choose between OpenAI (gpt-4o-mini, o3-mini, o1), Anthropic (Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Claude 3.5 Haiku), and Google Gemini (Gemini 3.5 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Pro).
Quick Start
1. Install the Extension
- In VS Code, go to the Extensions view (
Cmd+Shift+X), click the ... menu, select Install from VSIX..., and choose the aegis-cycle-1.0.0.vsix package.
- Alternatively, click the ⚡ Aegis Cycle icon in the left Activity Bar once published.
- Click the gear icon (⚙️) at the top of the sidebar.
- Select your preferred AI Provider and model, paste your API Key, and click Save Settings.
3. Launch a Pipeline
- Enter your Application Name, select an Archetype (Greenfield, Brownfield, or Modernization), and toggle Methodology Overlays (TDD, BDD, DDD).
- Input your project description and click Start Pipeline.
- Type
run in the chat to generate the Plan Proposal!
Educational Value
Aegis Cycle is designed to make industry-standard engineering practices (like writing ADRs, conducting FMEA risk analysis, mapping RTM traceability, and writing cucumber/gherkin behavioral tests) accessible and easy to learn for university software engineering courses.
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