You stay in control
No stage advances on its own. Every change to your code or config is held for your explicit approval before it lands, and nothing runs until you ask — Helix is on-demand, not a background process. The stages are also kept separate on purpose: Evaluate only decides pass or fail and routes any failures to Diagnose, which proposes the fixes. The stage that scores your agent is never the one that changes it, so a passing verdict can’t come from the tool that was supposed to earn it.Enter anywhere
You don’t have to start at Spec. Point Helix at an agent you already have and ask it to evaluate; it will derive criteria from your traces and score the current behaviour. Ask it to diagnose and it will root-cause what the evaluation flagged. The loop is a flexible path, not a fixed pipeline.Two of the lifecycle skills — the Evaluator and Diagnostics — also publish on npm and run
on their own, without the rest of Helix. See the lifecycle pages.