Free Playbook

The Intelligent Gates Playbook

AI compresses build time from weeks to hours. But CAB meetings, blanket approval paths, and manual change requests haven't moved. The result? Stalled pilots. Shadow AI. "Demo in 45 minutes, production in 4 months."

This playbook gives you a 1-page checklist to score your delivery pipeline against a 4-layer governance model — and fix the gates that actually matter.

The 4-Layer Model

The answer isn't removing gates. It's replacing inherited gates with intelligent ones — each layer scoped to what it does best.

1

Deterministic Gates

Linting, tests, policy-as-code, DLP. Pass/fail. No opinions. Runs in seconds. These catch 60–80% of issues without human involvement.

Pipeline enforces rules. OPA Gatekeeper · SonarQube · Trivy · Checkov
2

Agentic Pre-Review

AI checks standards, conventions, security hints. Flags, doesn't approve. Surfaces the 20% of changes that need real human attention.

AI flags and explains. CodeRabbit · Amazon CodeGuru · GitHub Copilot PR Review
3

Human Judgment (Scoped)

Scoped to blast radius, architecture, interfaces. Not line-by-line rubber-stamping. The human's job shifts from "check every line" to "own the decisions that have consequences."

Human owner approves blast radius. Architecture reviews · Threat modelling · DPIA sign-off
4

Production Feedback

Observability, feature flags, rollback, audit trails. Because agreement is not truth — only production is reality. The loop closes here.

Production signals enforce and feed back. Prometheus · LaunchDarkly · PagerDuty · Azure Monitor

What You Get

1-page checklist + quick score rubric

Score your pipeline against all 4 layers. Takes 10 minutes.

Example gate mapping

Policy → pipeline → owner. See how each layer connects.

Top 7 inherited-gate anti-patterns

The patterns that slow you down most. If you recognise 3 or more, your gates need rethinking.

Score Yourself This Week

The playbook includes a quick self-assessment. Score your pipeline 0–7 across the 4 layers:

0–2 Inherited Gates

Manual change requests, weekly CAB, blanket approval paths. Governance is the bottleneck.

3–4 Transitioning

Some automation in place, but human review still covers everything. AI tools used ad-hoc.

5–7 Intelligent Gates

Risk-proportionate controls. Pipeline handles deterministic checks. Humans scoped to blast radius. Production feeds back.

Get the Playbook

Score your pipeline against the 4-layer model. Identify the gates that need to move first.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. I'll send the PDF and nothing else until I have something genuinely useful.

What happens next?

1 Download the playbook
2 Score your gates (10 mins)
3 Put one gate in the pipeline this week

Who This Is For

Delivery Leads

Tired of governance being the bottleneck between "code complete" and "in production".

Platform Engineers

Building pipelines that need to enforce policy without slowing teams down.

Heads of Engineering

Responsible for governance in an organisation adopting AI-generated code at scale.

Governance & Risk

Looking for a framework that's proportionate, auditable, and doesn't require an army of reviewers.

Designed for regulated environments — public sector, health, energy, financial services.

What Intelligent Gates Enables

Shorter approval cycles without removing governance

Repeatable, auditable evidence generated by the pipeline — not humans

Reduced shadow AI behaviour — teams ship through the gates, not around them

Gates that move into the pipeline, backed by production feedback