Concepts

How pair works under the hood, the Knowledge Base, skills, adoption files, work-item states, quality tiers, the PR flow, package-local rules, agent integration and llms.txt, with a glossary.

These pages explain how pair works. Read them when you want understanding, not steps; the steps are in Guides and the flow in the Process Lifecycle. Every page ends with a Next link, so the whole section reads top to bottom.

Core

Start here if you are new to pair.

AI-assisted SDLC: the problem pair solves and how structured context changes AI collaboration end to end.
Knowledge Base: the documents installed into .pair/ that give your assistant persistent context.
Skills: the actions on top, structured instructions your assistant discovers and runs.
Adoption files: your project's decisions, recorded so they never drift.

Work and state

Canonical states: how skills reason about work-item state across any board vocabulary.
Definition of Ready and Done: the criteria that make a card Ready and a story Done.
Code host and PM tool: why cards and pull requests may live in different tools, and how pair routes between them.

Quality and review

Tag-driven quality gates: the risk tier, the tag it projects and the gate matrix it scales.
PR state flow: the three PR states, the required checks and why a label is a view, not the authority.
Review identity: running reviews under a dedicated identity, and light auto-approval.

Tooling

Package-local adoption: rules next to the code in a monorepo, loaded by scope.
Agent integration: the bridge pattern that connects any AI coding tool to the single source of truth.
llms.txt: the standard pair uses to make documentation and project context consumable by assistants.

Glossary

Glossary: card, macrostate, tier, harness, engine, seal, handoff and the rest, defined once.

The mechanics of delivery (stages, realizations, hooks, the merge stage) live with the flow they belong to: The delivery cycle in depth.