FAQ
Questions teams ask before trying HoldUp.
Short answers. The easiest way to understand it is still to run one real task through the workflow.
HoldUp finds the product and engineering constraints that matter for one coding task, turns them into a clear work packet for the coding agent, and checks the resulting pull request against the same packet.
No. Review is only the second half. The main job starts before implementation: make sure the agent knows the important constraints and does not have to guess through meaningful ambiguity.
No. Those are inputs. HoldUp is useful because teams already have information spread across different places and no single ticket contains all of it.
More is not always better. HoldUp is trying to identify the smallest useful set of task-specific constraints: what must happen, what must not change, what sources matter, and what questions need a human answer.
HoldUp shows the conflict and asks the team to resolve it before the agent silently chooses one source. That resolution becomes part of the work packet used for the PR check.
The target includes GitHub code and pull requests, Linear or Jira issues, AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md, ADRs, API schemas, database and migration docs, other repositories, and eventually connected docs or team conversations when they are useful for the task.
The work-packet model is agent-agnostic. The initial focus is the tools teams already use heavily, including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and similar coding agents.
Start with one real task or PR where the agent misunderstood the work, needed repeated steering, or missed a cross-repo or rollout constraint. We reconstruct the context manually, show the work packet, and use that to shape the product around real failures.