msd-core/docs/reference/state-md.md

STATE.md schema reference

STATE.md is MSD Core's living project-memory file — a single Markdown document that records where a project stands, what happened last, and what to run next. This page documents its structure. See docs index.

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Overview

Every project managed by MSD Core keeps one STATE.md at .planning/STATE.md. It is read at the start of every workflow and written after every significant action. The file combines:

• YAML frontmatter — machine-readable fields consumed by the status-line hook (parseStateMd) and the msd-tools state commands.
• Markdown body — human-readable sections covering current position, accumulated context, session continuity, and performance metrics.

The file is intentionally small (target: under 100 lines). It is a digest of the project's state, not an archive.

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YAML frontmatter

Frontmatter appears between --- delimiters at the very start of the file. All fields except msd_state_version and status are optional; fields may be absent when their data is not yet available.

Annotated example

---
msd_state_version: '1.0'
milestone: v2.0
milestone_name: Code Quality
status: executing

# Phase-lifecycle fields — all optional (added in v1.40.0, issue #2833)
active_phase: "4.5"
next_action: execute-phase
next_phases: ["4.5"]

progress:
  total_phases: 17
  completed_phases: 10
  total_plans: 84
  completed_plans: 47
  percent: 59

# Additional fields written by syncStateFrontmatter
current_phase: "4"
current_phase_name: Observability
current_plan: "3"
last_updated: "2026-06-01T12:34:56.789Z"
state_head: 4f3c2b1a9e8d7c6b5a4f3e2d1c0b9a8f7e6d5c4b
last_activity: "2026-06-01"
stopped_at: "Phase 4 P3 execution complete"
paused_at: null
---

Field reference

Field	Type	When populated	Purpose
msd_state_version	string ('1.0')	Always	Schema version; written on first state.* call by syncStateFrontmatter.
milestone	string (e.g. v2.0)	When a milestone is configured	Current milestone version, read from the project's config.
milestone_name	string	When a milestone is configured	Human-readable milestone label (e.g. Code Quality).
status	string	Always	Current lifecycle stage. Normalised by normalizeStateStatus() — see status values.
active_phase	string (e.g. "4.5")	An orchestrator command is in flight on this phase	The phase number currently being processed. Set to null when between phases.
next_action	string	Idle, with a recommended command	The slash command to run next: discuss-phase, plan-phase, execute-phase, or verify-phase. Set to null when an orchestrator is in flight or no recommendation is available.
next_phases	YAML flow array (e.g. ["4.5"])	Goes with next_action	The phase ID(s) the next_action applies to (typically 1–2 entries). Set to null under the same conditions as next_action.
progress.total_phases	integer	When phase data is available	Total number of phases in the current milestone, derived from ROADMAP.md and the phases directory.
progress.completed_phases	integer	When phase data is available	Number of phases that have all plan summaries on disk (i.e. every plan completed).
progress.total_plans	integer	When plan files exist	Sum of all plan files across phases in the current milestone.
progress.completed_plans	integer	When summary files exist	Sum of completed plan summaries (one SUMMARY.md per executed plan).
progress.percent	integer 0–100	When progress data is available	Milestone progress in the phase dimension (min(completed_plans/total_plans, completed_phases/total_phases)). The status-line progress bar is only rendered when this field is present — its absence suppresses the bar.
current_phase	string	When a phase is executing	Phase number extracted from the body Current Phase: field.
current_phase_name	string	When a phase has a name	Phase name extracted from the body Current Phase Name: field.
current_plan	string	When a plan is in progress	Plan number extracted from the body Current Plan: field.
last_updated	ISO-8601 timestamp	Always (on write)	Timestamp of the last syncStateFrontmatter call; written by realClock.nowIso().
state_head	string (40-char sha)	On write, when the project's own git repo resolves	Full commit sha STATE.md was written against (#2573). Omitted entirely outside a git repo, when the resolved repo is not the project's own, or in a planning.sub_repos workspace — an unverifiable stamp degrades to absent rather than asserting provenance the file does not have. Recomputed on every write and never carried forward.
last_activity	string	When set in body	Date of the last activity, extracted from the body Last Activity: field.
last_activity_desc	string	When set in body	Description of the last activity, extracted from the body Last Activity Description: field.
stopped_at	string	When a stop point was recorded	Description of the last completed action; scoped to the ## Session body section to avoid matching archive prose.
paused_at	string	When the project is paused	Freeform description of the pause point; absent or null when not paused.

Field cardinality

Field	Cardinality
msd_state_version	one
milestone	optional
milestone_name	optional
current_phase	optional
current_phase_name	optional
current_plan	optional
status	one
stopped_at	optional
paused_at	optional
last_updated	one
last_activity	optional
last_activity_desc	optional
state_head	optional
progress.total_phases	optional
progress.completed_phases	optional
progress.total_plans	optional
progress.completed_plans	optional
progress.percent	optional

Known limitation — multi-repo workspaces. In a workspace configured with planning.sub_repos, the freshness hint reports unknown rather than a commit age, and state_head is omitted. The outer workspace can own both .planning/ and its own git repo while every code commit lands in a nested child repo, so the outer HEAD would not advance when the code does — measuring against it would report "known fresh" for a STATE.md that is arbitrarily far behind. Reporting unknown is deliberate: a wrong answer here is worse than no answer. Aggregating freshness across several child histories needs a defined semantics and is not part of this feature.

Status values

normalizeStateStatus() in msd-core/bin/lib/state-document.cjs maps raw body text to these canonical values:

Canonical value	Matched text (case-insensitive)
discussing	contains discussing
planning	contains planning or ready to plan
executing	contains executing, in progress, or ready to execute
verifying	contains verif
completed	contains complete or done
paused	contains paused or stopped, or paused_at is present
unknown	none of the above

When an orchestrator command is in flight, the convention (issue #2833) is to write the lifecycle stage directly to status:

Command	status while in flight
/msd-discuss-phase	discussing
/msd-plan-phase	planning
/msd-execute-phase	executing
/msd-verify-work	verifying

Status lifecycle (ADR-2207)

The Status field follows a strict lifecycle across phase and milestone boundaries:

Value	Written by	Meaning
Ready to plan	completePhaseCore (non-last phase)	Next phase is ready for planning
All phases complete	completePhaseCore (last phase)	All phases done; milestone awaiting formal close
<version> milestone complete	milestoneCompleteCore	Milestone formally closed and archived
Awaiting next milestone	milestoneCompleteCore	Terminal/archived state

Phase-completion verbs never write Milestone complete (the overloaded bare value was removed in #2204 per ADR-2207 to decouple phase-level writes from milestone termination).

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Status-line rendering scenes

formatMsdState() in hooks/msd-statusline.js reads the parsed frontmatter and emits the first matching scene. If no new lifecycle fields apply, rendering falls through to the original format byte-for-byte unchanged from v1.38.x.

Scene	Trigger	Display example
1. Phase active	active_phase is populated	v2.0 [██░░░░░░░░] 20% · Phase 4.5 executing
2. Idle, next recommended	active_phase is null AND both next_action and next_phases are populated	v2.0 [██░░░░░░░░] 20% · next execute-phase 4.5
3. Milestone complete	percent is 100 OR completed_phases == total_phases	v2.0 [██████████] 100% · milestone complete
4. Default fallback	None of the above match	v1.9 Code Quality · executing · ph 1/5 (existing format)

Scene priority: when both active_phase and next_action are populated, Scene 1 wins — an orchestrator is in flight, so a "next recommendation" would be misleading. This priority is enforced by check order in formatMsdState() and covered by the "scene priority" suite in tests/msd-statusline.test.cjs.

When phase_id_convention is exactly "bracket" and project_code is set, the full and compact renderers replace the legacy milestone/phase labels with the canonical identity: [MSD.02] · [MSD.02] 05.03 executing. They do not emit the vX.Y, Phase, or compact P labels on that gated path. Any other convention, or a bracket config missing the metadata needed to form an ID, falls back to the strings shown in the table above.

The progress bar ([██░░░░░░░░] 20%) is appended to the milestone segment only when progress.percent is present in frontmatter; absent means no bar.

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Frontmatter parsing constraints

The status-line hook uses regex-based parsing (no full YAML library), so the following constraints apply. They are tested in tests/msd-statusline.test.cjs.

1. Frontmatter must start at the very first character of the file. Anything — including comments — above the opening --- invalidates the match. The opening --- line must be exactly that, with no trailing spaces.

2. Comments inside nested blocks are not supported. The progress: block parser requires the next line to be [ \t]+\w+:. Inserting a # comment between progress: and its first key breaks the match and the bar disappears. Any documentation belongs in the STATE.md body, not inside frontmatter blocks.

3. next_phases primary format is single-line flow. The parser first tries next_phases: ["4.5", "4.6"]. Block sequences (- 4.5\n- 4.6) are also parsed but are less reliable for status-line rendering. Prefer single-line flow for next_phases to keep the regex-based parser predictable. If many candidate phases need recording for documentation purposes, store them in the STATE.md body.

If a future change replaces the regex parser with a full YAML library, these constraints can be relaxed and the tests updated accordingly.

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Markdown body sections

The body (everything after the closing ---) follows the template in msd-core/templates/state.md. The standard sections are:

Project Reference

Points to .planning/PROJECT.md. Contains:

• Core value — the one-liner from PROJECT.md's Core Value section.
• Current focus — which phase is active.

Current Position

Where the project stands right now:

Field	Format
Phase:	X of Y (Phase name)
Plan:	A of B in current phase
Status:	Free text, e.g. Ready to execute, Executing Phase 4, Phase complete — ready for verification
Last activity:	ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD) when handler-written; narrative prose when executor-authored
Progress:	Visual bar, e.g. [████░░░░░░] 40%

Every field in this section is single-valued, and the section is overwritten rather than appended to. A second Phase: line is not a second position and is not history — it is malformed input. Readers do not resolve a duplicate by document order; they resolve it by form, checked in this order regardless of where each form appears within the ## Current Position section — bold **Phase:** value anywhere within the section, then plain Phase: value at the start of a line, then a pipe-table | Phase | value | row — and only within the winning form does the first occurrence win. A bold or plain line outside this section — an earlier ## Archive entry, or a bold line in the YAML frontmatter — is never consulted; production always scopes to the ## Current Position section first (#2956) before applying the form ranking. Two practical consequences: a duplicate written in a higher-ranked form wins even if it comes last in the section, so a bold line appended "for emphasis" silently overrides an earlier plain line instead of being ignored; and an indented Phase: line is invisible to the plain form (which anchors at line-start) and falls through to whatever form matches next. Two sharp edges follow from "higher form wins": a bold line whose value is only trailing whitespace resolves to an empty string rather than falling through to a valid plain line below it, and a pipe-table row whose label cell is itself bolded (| **Phase:** | value |) is caught by the bold pattern first, returning the literal cell text including its pipes. Write the section by replacing it, never by adding a line.

Progress history does not belong here. It accumulates in ### Performance Metrics below, which is the section designed to grow.

The Status: and Last activity: fields in this section are updated by MSD handlers when the existing value is a known template default (Knuth invariant: executor-authored values are preserved). The full list of known handler defaults is in KNOWN_TEMPLATE_DEFAULTS inside msd-core/bin/lib/state-document.cjs.

Performance Metrics

Execution velocity tracking:

• Total plans completed, average duration per plan.
• Per-phase breakdown table (Phase | Plans | Total | Avg/Plan).
• Recent trend: Improving / Stable / Degrading.

Updated after each plan completion.

Accumulated Context

Decisions — a summary of recent decisions affecting current work (full log lives in PROJECT.md). Added via msd-tools state add-decision.

Pending Todos — one bullet per pending todo (- [date] [area] title — [todo file](repo-relative path) — Needs ..., capped at 240 characters; repo-relative link keeps the cap independent of checkout path length). Captured via /msd-capture.

Blockers/Concerns — issues affecting future work, prefixed with the originating phase. Added via msd-tools state add-blocker; resolved via msd-tools state resolve-blocker.

Session Continuity

Enables instant session resumption:

• Last session: — ISO-8601 timestamp of the last session.
• Stopped at: — description of the last completed action.
• Resume file: — path to a .continue-here*.md file if one exists, otherwise None.

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Backward compatibility

The phase-lifecycle fields (active_phase, next_action, next_phases, and progress.percent for the bar) are additive and opt-in per project:

• A STATE.md with none of the lifecycle fields populated renders byte-for-byte identically to v1.38.x and earlier.
• Adding any lifecycle field is opt-in — the renderer degrades gracefully when fields are absent.
• The progress bar is opt-in even when the progress block exists: only progress.percent triggers the bar; total_phases and completed_phases alone do not.

The formatMsdState #2833 backward compatibility test suite in tests/msd-statusline.test.cjs locks this guarantee; any change that breaks legacy STATE.md rendering will fail the suite.

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Related

• Planning artifacts
• Configuration
• The phase loop
• docs index