Files
msd-core/docs/adr
Tom Boucher 27aa40f65e fix(#3023): stage pi's shared hook bundle outside pi's reserved hooks/ directory (#3175)
* test(#3023): failing-first guard — pi must not stage hooks in its reserved dir

pi reserves <configDir>/hooks as its deprecated extension location and warns
on every startup when it exists. Assert a pi install stages the shared hook
bundle under gsd-hooks/ instead, manifests it there, and never creates hooks/.

Also adds pi to the local-scope dir table in install-shared.cjs: pi was in
RUNTIME_META but not LOCAL_DIR_NAME, so scope:'local' resolved
path.join(root, undefined) and no local pi install could be exercised.

Fails before the fix. Verified via the remote runner.

* fix(#3023): stage pi's shared hook bundle outside pi's reserved hooks/ dir

pi reserves <configDir>/hooks as its now-deprecated extension location and
warns on every startup when that directory merely exists — checkDeprecatedExtensionDirs()
guards the warning with a bare existsSync(), unlike its tools/ sibling. GSD staged
its shared hook bundle exactly there, and pi's advised remediation (move it to
extensions/) would break the adapter's paths and expose GSD's .js helpers to pi's
extension auto-discovery.

The bundle directory name is now runtime-descriptor-driven: hostBehaviors
.sharedHooksDirName, defaulting to 'hooks' so all 18 other runtimes are
byte-identical. pi sets 'gsd-hooks'. The name is validated as a single path
segment — separators, dot-only segments, trailing dots, absolute paths, NUL,
and Windows reserved device names all fall back to the default, because the
value is joined onto a user's config root and written to.

Renamed in place rather than relocated: hook scripts resolve siblings via
__dirname/.., so a depth change would silently break them.

- install / uninstall / manifest sites all read the resolved name
- pi/gsd.cjs probes gsd-hooks then hooks, so dev checkouts and half-upgraded
  trees still resolve; the never-throws contract is preserved
- new migration 009 retires the legacy pi hooks/ dir on upgrade, using a new
  non-recursive remove-empty-dir engine primitive (rmdirSync only,
  symlink-refusing, containment-guarded); ADR-0008 amended accordingly
- fixes two latent name-dependencies the rename exposed: the stale-hook scan
  and the injection scanner's self-exclusion both hardcoded 'hooks'

Verified on the remote runner.

Closes #3023

* fix(#3023): close review findings and align emitted provenance with the rename

Adversarial review found two defects, and the remote runner found four
failure clusters. All fixed here.

Review BLOCKER — detect-custom-files was blind to the renamed bundle.
GSD_PREFIX_MANAGED_DIRS in gsd-tools.cjs hardcoded 'hooks', so for pi the
whole gsd-hooks/ tree was invisible to the custom-file scan and user-added
files there were never backed up before the next update's clean-install wipe.
The dir set now resolves via the .gsd-runtime marker plus the shipped
capability registry (never bin/install.js, which is not shipped into installed
trees), and falls back to scanning every known candidate when the runtime
cannot be determined — over-scanning is safe, under-scanning is the data loss.

Review MAJOR — the pi adapter bound to an empty bundle. resolveSharedHooksDir
accepted any directory, so an interrupted install left gsd-hooks/ winning over
a fully-staged legacy hooks/ and every hook silently no-opped. A candidate now
qualifies only if it is non-empty.

Remote-runner clusters:
- emitted-provenance had no rule for the gsd-hooks/ family; added two pi-scoped
  rules pointing at the same sources the existing hooks/ rules use. The table is
  total, so an unattributed family is a hard failure by design.
- pi tests in install-minimal-hooks and the install integration suite asserted
  the old layout; updated to derive the dir name from the descriptor rather than
  hardcoding either name.
- 19 unrelated-looking failures on node22 only were a leaked fs mock: t.after()
  runs in registration order, cleanup was registered before mock.restoreAll(),
  and node22's JS rimraf calls the public fs.rmdirSync while node24's native
  path does not — so the EACCES stub leaked process-wide on one lane. Restore
  now runs first.

Verified on the remote runner.

* fix(#3023): honor PI_CODING_AGENT_DIR, ack the rename ripple, fix expandTilde

pi resolves its agent dir as PI_CODING_AGENT_DIR ?? ~/<CONFIG_DIR_NAME>/agent
(packages/coding-agent/src/config.ts). GSD's pi descriptor declared an empty
configHome.env, so a user with that variable set had GSD installed where pi
never looks. Added the env name; the dot-home-nested resolver already handled
the override, so no resolver logic changed.

Also fixes expandTilde in the shared runtime-homes resolver, found while adding
that: it hardcoded os.homedir() and ignored the opts.home every caller threads,
so EVERY runtime's tilde-valued env override (claude, antigravity, windsurf, pi)
silently resolved against the real home. That is a correctness bug and a
test-escape hazard — a sandboxed test asserting on a tilde override reached the
developer's actual home directory. Now threaded through every branch; behavior
with no injected home is unchanged.

Adds the emitted-drift ack fragment for the 58 pi paths whose emitted location
moved with the rename. The provenance rules satisfy the totality gate; the
differential gate needs the ack because the hook sources are byte-unchanged —
only the installer's target directory moved. The two hook files this branch
genuinely edits stay attributed and are not double-acked.

Note on piConfig.configDir: it is read from pi's OWN installed package.json
(getPackageDir walks up from pi's __dirname), alongside piConfig.name — a
white-label setting for a redistributed pi fork, not a per-project user setting.
Documented accordingly rather than treated as an unsupported override.

Verified on the remote runner.

* fix(#3023): reject blank env overrides, pin adapter/descriptor parity

Three review findings, all fixed.

A whitespace-only config-dir override was accepted verbatim: the guard was
`if (val)`, falsy only for the empty string, so PI_CODING_AGENT_DIR='   '
resolved to a literal three-space directory name instead of falling back to the
descriptor default. Fixed across every env-consuming branch — dot-home,
dot-home-nested, all three xdg steps, and generic-agents-root — not just pi's.
Non-blank values are still never trimmed, so '~/My Agent Dir' keeps working.

pi/gsd.cjs's probe list and the descriptor were two independent sources of truth
for the bundle directory name; a future rename would have desynced them silently
and left every pi hook quiet with no error. The probe list stays deliberate — it
must resolve in a dev checkout and a half-upgraded tree, where the registry's
answer would be wrong — so this adds the parity assertion the repo's
generative-fix-divergence rule calls for: the descriptor value must be the FIRST
candidate, and the default must remain present.

Changeset body rewritten to cover the two later user-facing fixes it had not
caught up with.

Verified on the remote runner.

* chore(#3023): backfill changeset PR number

* fix(#3023): anchor injection-scan patterns and fix a macOS detection hole

CI's security job flagged CONTEXT.md:124 — pre-existing prose reading 'not the
same fact as a genuinely empty or absent one'. The match was the 'act as a'
INSIDE 'f-act as a': the pattern had no left word boundary, so any word ending
in act tripped it (fact, impact, contract, artifact, interact, redact,
abstract). My four-line CONTEXT.md edit dragged the latent false positive into
this PR because the scan is diff-scoped by file but reads whole files. Anchored
with (^|[^[:alnum:]]) rather than rewording maintainer-owned prose, which would
have left the class alive for the next PR touching any file saying 'fact as a'.

Auditing the rest of the list for the same class surfaced a real detection hole:
the eval/exec/Function patterns matched a quote via \x27, a GNU-grep-only hex
escape. BSD/macOS grep reads it as four literal characters, so single-quoted
eval('...')/exec('...') payloads were NEVER detected there while passing on
GNU-grep CI. Replaced with a literal apostrophe class.

Boundaries were added only where a real word-suffix collision exists; exec,
jailbreak, developer mode and the role-manipulation family were audited and
deliberately left unanchored. 22 new cases cover both directions — the false
positives now scan clean, and every real payload still fires, including the
quote/punctuation/start-of-line boundary forms.

Also builds this branch's injection test fixture at runtime instead of carrying
the literal phrase, so the payload keeps its teeth without tripping the scan.

Verified on the remote runner.

---------

Co-authored-by: sim <sim@local>
2026-08-07 13:41:21 -04:00
..

Architecture Decision Records

This directory contains Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for GSD.

Each ADR documents one architectural decision: what was decided, why, and what consequences follow. ADRs are append-only. Amendments extend existing ADRs with a dated section rather than replacing them.

Reading this corpus

Start with the index below, and respect the status. The index is grouped so that the first table — Active decisions — is the set that governs the system as it stands. An ADR in Superseded, Retired, and Legacy is historical: it records what was once decided and names what replaced it. Do not cite it as current architecture.

Two things the index makes explicit, because getting them wrong has actually misled readers here:

  • "Read first" on an active ADR points at a broader ADR that now frames it. A decision can be entirely correct and still not be the whole picture. The runtime capability descriptor (ADR-1016) is live and load-bearing, but ADR-1239 (EoS — GSD as an Embeddable Orchestration Engine) subsumes it as the declarative adapter and inverts its direction: GSD is the engine a host embeds, not an installer that projects onto a host. For how GSD meets a host, EoS is the current frame.
  • Proposed means not ratified — and it is kept honest. On 2026-07-17 the corpus was audited against the shipped tree and nine ADRs whose decisions had demonstrably shipped were ratified to Accepted, each carrying a dated Ratification section with the evidence (see ADR-857 for the fullest example). The ADRs that remain Proposed are Proposed for a reason recorded in the file — an unmet acceptance criterion, an outstanding phase, or a successor ADR already planned — not through neglect. Trust the label; if you think it is wrong, prove it in a dated section and see Ratifying a stale Proposed.

Naming Convention

New ADRs use issue#-prefix slug naming:

docs/adr/<issue#>-<kebab-slug>.md

Examples: 2264-golden-parity-redesign.md, 1239-gsd-embeddable-orchestration-engine.md.

Why

Two developers computing "next ADR number" locally against main will independently pick the same integer and both ship. The collision is already on disk — 0010-* exists twice and 0011-* exists three times. GitHub issue numbers are server-assigned and atomic: the moment you open an issue, that number is reserved globally. Two PRs that both edit the ### Fixed block of CHANGELOG.md always conflict on merge — two PRs that each use a distinct issue# as their ADR prefix never collide. Same shape, same solution.

Legacy naming is not Legacy status

Files 0001-* through 0012-* are preserved as immutable historical record of the old local-compute numbering. The duplicate 0010-* and the three-way 0011-* are documented residue of that convention — not patterns to imitate. Do not renumber them.

This is the single authoritative statement of the legacy range. docs/contributor-standards.md references it rather than restating it, so the two cannot drift.

Two other zero-padded files look legacy but are not: 0174-retire-gsd-sdk-package-boundary.md (issue #174) and 0656-research-module-seam.md (issue #656) are mis-padded modern ADRs — modern, issue-numbered files whose four-digit padding is a mistake. They are NOT part of the legacy sequential set above and are not "old local-compute numbering" residue.

This is a statement about filenames only. Many of those ADRs are Accepted and load-bearing today (ADR-0002, ADR-0004, ADR-0008, ADR-0009). An old filename says nothing about whether a decision still holds. The Legacy status in the table below is a separate claim — see the vocabulary.

Because 0010-* and 0011-* each resolve to more than one file, a bare cross-reference like "ADR-0011" is genuinely ambiguous. Link the file (see Lifecycle rules).

Full process

See CONTRIBUTING.md — "Proposing an ADR or PRD" for the end-to-end workflow: opening the issue, waiting for approval, naming the file, and submitting the PR.

PRDs live in docs/prd/, not here. (0011-review-default-reviewers-prd.md predates that directory and is kept in place as frozen historical record.)

Lifecycle rules

These are enforced by scripts/gen-adr-index.cjs, which runs in CI via npm run lint:generated-sync. A violation fails the build with the exact file and fix.

1. Every ADR declares one status from the canonical vocabulary

The first word of the Status field must be one of:

Status Means Obligation
Accepted Decided and in force. Cite it. —
Proposed Decided in principle, not ratified. Do not cite as settled. If the work has demonstrably shipped, ratify it (below) — do not leave the label lying.
Superseded A specific newer ADR replaced this decision. Must name the successor as a file link.
Retired What this ADR decided no longer exists at all, and no single ADR replaced it. Say what was removed and when.
Legacy Frozen historical record, kept for provenance; not a pattern to follow. Say why it is frozen.

Prose may follow the token (Superseded by [ADR-0174](0174-retire-gsd-sdk-package-boundary.md) (2026-05-23); originally Accepted (2026-05-09)). Both the bullet form (- **Status:** Accepted) and the table form (| **Status** | Accepted |) are accepted.

Write [ADR-0011](0011-skill-surface-budget-module.md), not ADR-0011. Bare ids are ambiguous for 0010/0011, and unlinked references cannot be checked.

If you mean an issue, write #857 — not ADR-857. (An ADR and its owning issue often share a number; that is intentional and not a conflict.)

3. Supersession and subsumption are symmetric

These are different relations. Do not conflate them:

  • Supersedes / Superseded by — the target is replaced. Its status becomes Superseded.
  • Subsumes / Subsumed by — the target still holds, but a broader ADR now frames it. Its status is unchanged; it becomes a component of the larger decision.

If A declares either relation toward B, B must record the reciprocal. A one-way pointer is the failure this corpus actually suffered: ADR-1239 declared it subsumed four ADRs, none of which said so, and none of which pointed back — so a reader landing on any of them concluded the superseded frame was the way forward.

Only an Accepted ADR is owed the back-link. A Proposed ADR's claim is prospective: it has not taken effect, so its target is not marked. On ratification, the check begins demanding the back-links.

4. The declared id matches the filename

An H1 of # ADR-0175: … in a file named 218-*.md is a rename that never finished. The id in the title must match the filename's prefix.

Ratifying a stale Proposed

A stale Proposed is not cosmetic: it tells contributors and agents that live architecture is an unbuilt idea. Fix it — but on evidence, not vibes.

The bar. All four must hold before flipping to Accepted:

  1. The decided mechanism demonstrably exists in the tree — name the files, symbols, and tests.
  2. The owning issue is closed as completed. A closed issue is not proof: stateReason of not planned / duplicate means the decision was dropped (that is Legacy or Retired, not Accepted).
  3. No material part is unshipped. If the ADR defines phases and one is outstanding, or states its own bar for acceptance and that bar is unmet, it stays Proposed.
  4. No later ADR supersedes it, and no approved issue already plans its graduation as separate work.

The procedure. Set the status to Accepted — ratified <date> (originally Proposed <date>), add a dated ## Ratification section holding the evidence, then run node scripts/gen-adr-index.cjs --write. If the ADR claims to supersede or subsume others, the gate will now demand their back-links — that is the point. Ratify deliberately.

Two traps worth knowing, both hit during the 2026-07-17 audit:

  • Shipped code is necessary, not sufficient. Eight ADRs had every named module, symbol, and test present and their epics closed — and still failed the bar: ADR-2264's own headline acceptance criterion is unmet in the tree, ADR-230's decided branch protection does not match the live API, ADR-660's namesake mechanism is performed by hand, and ADR-959 has an approved issue planning its graduation as its own ADR. Verify the decision, not just the code.
  • "Supersedes" is often "subsumes". Read what the ADR means before the gate makes you act on what it says. ADR-857 said "Supersedes (generalizes)"; taken literally, ratifying it would have stamped two live seams (ADR-0011, ADR-58) as dead. The parenthetical was the truth; the field name was wrong.

Maintaining the index

The index is generated. Do not hand-edit it. Everything between the ADR-INDEX:START / ADR-INDEX:END markers is derived from the ADR files themselves:

node scripts/gen-adr-index.cjs            # print the index
node scripts/gen-adr-index.cjs --write    # regenerate it into this file
node scripts/gen-adr-index.cjs --check    # CI: fail if stale or invalid

After adding an ADR, or changing any ADR's status or relations, run --write and commit the result. npm run lint:generated-sync runs --check in CI, so a missing or stale row fails the build rather than rotting silently.

This replaces a hand-maintained table that had drifted to 40 of 65 ADRs — the entire capability family and EoS itself were missing from it, which is precisely why the ADRs a reader most needed were the ones they could not find.

Index

Active decisions (55)

These govern the system as it stands. Cite these.

ADR Title Status Read first
ADR-0001 Dispatch policy module as single seam for query execution outcomes Accepted —
ADR-0002 Command Contract Validation Module Accepted —
ADR-0003 Model Catalog Module as single source of truth for agent profiles and runtime tier defaults Accepted —
ADR-0004 Planning Workspace Module as single seam for worktree and workstream state Accepted —
ADR-0006 Planning Path Projection Module for SDK query handlers Accepted —
ADR-0008 Installer Migration Module owns install-time upgrade safety Accepted —
ADR-0009 Shell Command Projection Module owns runtime-aware OS command rendering Accepted —
ADR-0011 review.default_reviewers config key scopes the no-flag /gsd-review fan-out Accepted —
ADR-0011 Skill Surface Budget Module owns install-time profile staging and runtime surface control Accepted ADR-857
ADR-15 Cross-AI Plan Convergence via Existing Orchestration Commands Accepted —
ADR-22 Plan-vs-codebase drift guard: defaults and symbol-resolver seam Accepted —
ADR-58 Runtime Install Policy Module owns the typed install-plan projection Accepted ADR-1239, ADR-857
ADR-0174 Retire @opengsd/gsd-sdk package boundary — single-runtime collapse Accepted —
ADR-218 Harden release-workflow version validation — reject leading zeros and pre-check npm Accepted —
ADR-227 Input validation must check semantic shape, not just type Accepted —
ADR-415 Prevent stale-base reintroduction of retired runtime tokens Accepted —
ADR-452 Adopt standard ESLint flat-config lint harness Accepted —
ADR-456 Test-rigor architecture — deterministic scheduling, antagonistic tier, typed-surface mandate, and delete-bad-tests policy Accepted —
ADR-457 Generation model for bin/lib/*.cjs type safety Accepted —
ADR-550 spec-phase probe pattern and prohibition contract Accepted —
ADR-0656 Research Module — L2-hybrid seam for cached, curated-first research Accepted —
ADR-766 Claude Code Plugin Manifest Module owns the projection of gsd-core surfaces onto the Claude Code plugin contract Accepted —
ADR-857 Capability system — five-step loop as core, features as plug-ins behind Loop Extension Points Accepted —
ADR-894 Capability declaration format + registry generation Accepted ADR-1239
ADR-959 Capability Command Contribution Accepted —
ADR-1016 Runtime Capability Descriptor Accepted ADR-1239
ADR-1235 Migrate agent conversion to the descriptor-driven install path Accepted —
ADR-1239 GSD as an Embeddable Orchestration Engine Accepted —
ADR-1244 Capability Ecosystem: third-party authoring, versioned manifests, and URL import/upgrade/remove Accepted —
ADR-1372 Canonical markdown-structure parsing — the markdown-sectionizer seam Accepted —
ADR-1411 Resolution must report provenance, not fall open silently Accepted —
ADR-1508 Runtime Artifact Conversion Module owns per-runtime content rewriting Accepted —
ADR-1517 Reviewer instances — bounded config surface for same-adapter multi-model review Accepted —
ADR-1577 Untrusted-input boundary + opt-in injection blocking Accepted —
ADR-1593 Skill mapping & converter methodology across runtimes Accepted —
ADR-1610 workflow & agent size-budget ratchet (per-file byte baseline + tier hard caps) Accepted —
ADR-1703 Cross-platform portability enforcement as AST ESLint rules Accepted —
ADR-1769 STATE.md Transition Module — intent-based transitions over scattered RMW callbacks Accepted —
ADR-1787 /gsd:next smart-entry front door delegates advancement to /gsd:progress --next Accepted —
ADR-1817 STATE.md rebuild — derivability contract (capstone transition) Accepted —
ADR-1820 Spec-Optional Predicate Rail — the Spec-Section Detection Module, the fallback toggle, and the SPEC↔probe precedence contract Accepted —
ADR-1866 agent_skills dual injection — orchestrator-side + agent-side self-load Accepted —
ADR-1990 Existing Code Onboarding Module owns deterministic repo-state detection and onboarding route selection Accepted —
ADR-2008 Generic gate-predicate evaluator Accepted —
ADR-2121 Phase-Identifier Parsing Consolidation Accepted —
ADR-2143 Markdown Table Model, Bounded Mutation, and Fail-Loud Consolidation (#1372 part 2) Accepted —
ADR-2164 Statusline draws its data boundary at local, read-only sources Accepted —
ADR-2207 STATE.md Status lifecycle — phase-completion writes an intermediate state; milestone-close owns termination Accepted —
ADR-2346 Command Dispatch Completion Accepted —
ADR-2619 Observability and shareable diagnostics — wire the dispatch seam, add the outbound trust boundary Accepted —
ADR-2629 Phase effort is estimated against a calibrated smart-zone budget, not a static heuristic Accepted —
ADR-2719 Emitted-artifact attribution — replace the committed parity fixtures with a computed conservation law Accepted —
ADR-2782 Reviewer Lane — the cross-AI reviewer handoff becomes a declared capability surface Accepted —
ADR-2966 Test the five-step loop as a continuous walk, not isolated points Accepted —
ADR-3660 Runtime Artifact Layout Module owns per-runtime artifact placement Accepted ADR-1239

Proposed (9)

Decided in principle, not yet ratified. Do not cite as settled architecture.

ADR Title Status Read first
ADR-230 Introduce next as a long-lived integration branch Proposed —
ADR-443 Unified cross-provider effort controls and fast-mode-aware routing Proposed —
ADR-612 Bracket Phase-ID Convention Proposed —
ADR-660 Release from the head of next; immutable release tags; @next dist-tag as the RC surface Proposed —
ADR-1143 Claude orchestration capability — Workflow tool (ultracode) as a runtime-gated loop execution backend Proposed —
ADR-1213 Capability write side — the Capability State Writer Proposed —
ADR-1606 prohibition-enforcement verify-time seam Proposed —
ADR-1671 Dynamic context management platform Proposed —
ADR-3128 Adaptive runtime evidence for GSD Debug Proposed —

Superseded, Retired, and Legacy (8)

Historical record. Do not follow these — each names what replaced it, or why it was retired.

ADR Title Status Replaced by
ADR-0005 SDK Architecture seam map for query/runtime surfaces Superseded ADR-0174
ADR-0007 SDK Package Seam Module owns SDK-to-get-shit-done-redux compatibility Superseded ADR-0174
ADR-0010 File Operation Engine Module owns safe runtime/config file mutations Superseded ADR-0009
ADR-0010 Skill Surface Budget Module owns install-time skill listing curation Superseded ADR-0011
ADR-0011 PRD — review.default_reviewers config key for /gsd-review reviewer selection Legacy —
ADR-0012 CommandRoutingHub as single dispatch seam for CJS command families Superseded ADR-0174
ADR-2264 Redesign golden-install-parity — single-source manifest builder + split invariant Superseded ADR-2719
ADR-3524 CJS↔SDK hard seam — one source of truth per Shared Module Superseded ADR-0174

72 ADRs. Generated by scripts/gen-adr-index.cjs — run --write after adding or restatusing an ADR.

Seam map

Orientation for the module-ownership ADRs. This section is prose and hand-maintained; the index above is the authority on status.

How GSD meets a host — start at ADR-1239 (EoS). It is the current frame and subsumes the descriptor/projection ADRs (ADR-1016, ADR-58, ADR-3660, ADR-894) as adapters beneath it.

The SDK seam map is gone. ADR-0005 was once the entry point for SDK module ownership; it is superseded by ADR-0174, which retired the @opengsd/gsd-sdk package boundary entirely. There is no sdk/ tree. Read ADR-0174 for the single-runtime collapse; the seam-Module vocabulary survives under one src/.

ADR-0006 documents how query handlers project planning paths (cwd → effectiveRoot → .planning/<project>/...). Cross-reference the Planning Workspace Module (ADR-0004) for workstream pointer policy.

ADR-0008 documents the Installer Migration Module for safe install-time moves, removals, config rewrites, and user-data preservation.

ADR-0009 documents the Shell Command Projection Module seam for runtime-aware projection of installer-owned command text and projection IR. Its Phases 3–4 absorbed the File Operation Engine Module (ADR-0010).

ADR-0011 documents the Skill Surface Budget Module for install-time skill/agent profile staging (--profile=<name>, .gsd-profile marker, requires: closure) and the Phase 2 runtime /gsd:surface command.

ADR-1411 establishes the Resolution Provenance principle: context resolution (config loading, project-root anchoring, workstream resolution) must report its provenance rather than fall open silently to defaults. It is the resolution-side analog of ADR-227 (input-validation shape).