Dev loop design
How Meridian structures the inner development loop — from save to feedback — so you stay in flow and ship faster.
The three-second rule
Every change you make must produce visible feedback within three seconds. Hot-reload boundaries, test runners, and lint cascades are tuned so the loop never breaks. If a step takes longer, it gets split or cached.
Save → verify → ship
The canonical loop is three stages. Save triggers format-on-save plus a fast type-check. Verify runs the affected test suite in watch mode. Ship is a single command that builds, signs, and stages the artifact. No manual steps between stages.
Feedback density
Errors appear inline, not in a separate terminal. Warnings are non-blocking but visible. The goal is maximum information with minimum context switch. Meridian uses structured diagnostics that point directly to the source line and suggest fixes.
Guardrails, not gates
Pre-commit hooks run only the fast checks. Heavy integration tests belong in CI. The local loop stays lightweight so developers never hesitate to experiment. A broken experiment costs seconds, not minutes.