Why a plugin architecture
The first workflow is never the expensive one. The expensive one is the fifth, once four have each grown their own orchestration, their own retry behaviour, and their own idea of what an approval means.
Building the platform first and the workflow second meant the flagship workflow was the first tenant of an interface rather than the thing the interface was later extracted from. New agentic workflows onboard with minimal code.
The flagship workflow
It cross-references Confluence requirements against the codebase without requiring explicit links between them — which is the part that makes it useful, because in practice those links are exactly what nobody maintains. From there it detects implementation gaps and generates an analysis report.
A human gate before anything is written
The workflow proposes; it does not merge. On approval it creates a Jira ticket and opens a pull request with the proposed changes. The approval step is the design: an agent that writes to the tracker and the repository unattended is a much larger claim than one that drafts and waits.