How APEX works
Executive summary
Section titled “Executive summary”APEX guides Azure infrastructure work through requirements, architecture, governance, planning, code generation, deployment, and as-built documentation. Optional design work adds diagrams and decision records.
The owner selects each main agent. Skills provide reusable guidance, instructions define conventions, and MCP tools supply external evidence. Validators check specific contracts. Required reviews and human approvals remain separate from those checks.
Generated Bicep or Terraform is an implementation to inspect and validate. Generation alone does not establish policy compliance, deployment readiness, or application health.
Recommended reading order
Section titled “Recommended reading order”Start with the workflow overview. Read system architecture for the records that connect its steps, then agent architecture for ownership and handoffs. Use the remaining references when inspecting a specific mechanism.
Intellectual foundations
Section titled “Intellectual foundations”The product’s golden-principles skill describes its engineering influences. Those influences are background reading, not runtime contracts or evidence of deployment reliability.
Harness engineering (OpenAI)
Section titled “Harness engineering (OpenAI)”The OpenAI article discusses repository guidance and automated feedback for coding agents. In APEX, inspect the actual instructions, templates, and validator coverage rather than assuming every written rule has mechanical enforcement.
Ralph (Snarktank)
Section titled “Ralph (Snarktank)”Ralph is a separate autonomous iteration project. APEX’s former autonomous E2E subsystem is retired. Current APEX workflows retain human-selected main-agent handoffs and approval gates. See workflow validation.
How this project synthesises both
Section titled “How this project synthesises both”APEX retains versioned project artifacts, scoped tasks, and validation feedback.
apex-recall supports state inspection and controlled updates between sessions.
These mechanisms do not make every step stateless, guarantee transactional changes
across all artifacts, or authorize autonomous deployment.
Golden principles
Section titled “Golden principles”Read the pinned skill for the complete principles. For a project run, apply them through specific evidence: current requirements, explicit decisions, reviewed contracts, reproducible checks, and recorded outcomes.
When a recurring defect suggests a product change, record a lesson and submit the correction for review. Do not silently rewrite approved artifacts or policy.