managing-autonomous-development

Managing Autonomous Development

Overview

Manage Sugar's autonomous development workflows: create development tasks, check system status, review pending work, and start autonomous execution mode. Sugar orchestrates AI-driven development by queuing tasks with type, priority, and execution parameters, then processing them sequentially or in parallel.

Prerequisites

• Sugar plugin installed and configured in the project
• Sugar CLI available in the system PATH (sugar --version)
• Project repository initialized with Sugar configuration file
• Understanding of task types: feature, bugfix, refactor, test, chore
• Write access to the project codebase for autonomous execution

Instructions

1. Check Sugar system status with /sugar-status to verify the daemon is running and view queue depth
2. Review pending tasks with /sugar-review to see queued work items, their priorities, and estimated complexity
3. Create new tasks with /sugar-task <description> --type <type> --priority <1-5> specifying the task description, type, and priority level
4. Validate Sugar configuration before starting autonomous mode: ensure test commands, lint rules, and commit settings are correct
5. Start autonomous execution in safe mode first: /sugar-run --dry-run --once to preview what Sugar would do without making changes
6. Monitor execution output for errors, test failures, or unexpected behavior during the dry run
7. Start full autonomous execution with /sugar-run when confident in the configuration
8. Review completed tasks and their outputs: check generated code, test results, and commit messages

Output

• Task creation confirmations with task ID, type, priority, and queue position
• System status reports showing queue depth, active tasks, and execution history
• Task review summaries with descriptions, priorities, and estimated effort
• Execution logs showing task processing, code changes, test results, and commits
• Summary reports of completed autonomous development sessions

Error Handling

Error	Cause	Solution
Sugar daemon not running	Sugar service not started or crashed	Start with sugar start or check logs for crash reason
Task creation failed: invalid type	Unsupported task type specified	Use valid types: feature, bugfix, refactor, test, chore
Autonomous execution failed: tests failing	Generated code does not pass project tests	Review the failing test output; fix the test or adjust the task description for clarity
Configuration file not found	Sugar config missing from project root	Initialize with sugar init to create the configuration file
Priority out of range	Priority value not between 1 and 5	Use priority 1 (lowest) through 5 (highest/critical)

Examples

• "Create a new Sugar task: 'Add input validation to the user registration endpoint' with type feature and priority 3."
• "Check the current Sugar system status and list all pending tasks in the queue."
• "Start Sugar autonomous mode in dry-run to preview what changes it would make for the next queued task."

Resources

• Sugar plugin documentation: https://github.com/roboticforce/sugar
• Task automation patterns: https://roboticforce.io/docs/sugar/
• Autonomous development best practices: https://roboticforce.io/docs/sugar/best-practices/