◇ Could this help me?
Yes. The ladder itself is informal, but every practice it names is a real one and the ordering is broadly right: project instructions and plan mode before orchestration, orchestration before evals and CI. It is useful as a gap-finding checklist, which is a general practice rather than anything specific to one codebase.
Review this project against the following AI engineering practices and tell me which are already in place, which are missing, and which two would add the most reliability next: a project instructions file, MCP connections, planning before edits, model selection per task, a structured file layout, context engineering, spec-driven development, git branching, secrets management, orchestrator and worker patterns, structured outputs, state persistence, human approval gates, sandboxed execution, evals, verification loops, CI/CD, tracing and observability, and retries with fallbacks. Report only. Do not install or add anything as part of this review.