The merge gate

Every change is cross-checked against the full engineering graph before it can ship. A firmware pull request that touches a pin is verified against the schematic. A BOM change is diffed against the ECAD source. A CAD revision is checked for clashes with the live PCB outline. The gate runs these checks automatically on every change.

A human — always. Agents propose diffs; they never commit. Every output is a reviewable diff, scoped by discipline and routed to the right owners. The merge gate is where the human says yes, with the full cross-discipline impact in front of them.

A traditional design review is a scheduled meeting where humans try to hold the whole product in their heads. The merge gate is continuous and automated: agents do the cross-discipline checking on every change, so the human review is fast, focused, and backed by evidence instead of memory.

The opposite. The gate replaces the slow parts of review — hunting for impacts, scheduling cross-discipline meetings, re-checking the same dependencies — with instant automated checks. What used to take a review cycle takes minutes, and the checks are more thorough than a human could be.

The change is flagged with the exact conflict: which artefacts disagree, what the impact is, and who owns the decision. Pilot teams see the gate catch at least one genuine mismatch their existing review process missed — that is one of the written success criteria of every ProductFlo pilot.