msd-core/docs/RELEASE-v1.40.0-rc.1.md

v1.40.0-rc.1 Release Notes

Pre-release candidate. Published to npm under the next tag.

npx get-shit-done-cc@next

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What's in this release

rc.1 opens the 1.40.0 train. The headline change is the skill-surface consolidation (#2790) and the new two-stage hierarchical routing that sits on top of it (#2792) — together they take the cold-start system-prompt overhead from listing 86 flat skills down to 6 namespace routers. The release also adds the read-side of the phase-lifecycle status-line, hardens the multi-runtime install converters, and clears a backlog of small correctness fixes against Gemini, Copilot, Codex, and the canary publish workflow.

Added

• Six namespace meta-skills with keyword-tag descriptions (#2792) — replace the flat eager skill listing with a two-stage hierarchical routing layer. The model sees 6 namespace routers instead of 86 entries, selects a namespace, then routes to the sub-skill. Namespaces: gsd:workflow (phase pipeline), gsd:project (project lifecycle), gsd:review (quality gates), gsd:context (codebase intelligence), gsd:manage (config / workspace / workstreams), gsd:ideate (exploration / capture). Descriptions use pipe-separated keyword tags (≤ 60 chars) per the Tool Attention research showing keyword-dense tags outperform prose for routing at ~40% the token cost.

  	Entries	Approx tokens
  Pre-1.40 full install	86	~2,150
  Namespace meta-skills	6	~120

  Existing sub-skills are unchanged and still invocable directly — the namespace skills are additive.

• /gsd-health --context utilization guard (#2792) — adds a context-window quality guard with two thresholds: 60 % utilization warns ("consider /gsd-thread"), 70 % is critical ("reasoning quality may degrade"; matches the fracture-point per recent context-attention research). Exposed via /gsd-health --context and as a structured gsd-tools validate context command for status-line / hook callers.

• Phase-lifecycle status-line — read-side (#2833) — parseStateMd() now reads four new STATE.md frontmatter fields: active_phase (phase number when orchestrator is in-flight), next_action (recommended next command when idle), next_phases (YAML flow array of next phase numbers), and progress (nested completed/total/percent block). formatGsdState() gains scenes for in-flight, idle, and progress display. All fields default to undefined, so existing STATE.md files keep rendering as before. Write-side and status-line wiring follow in a later RC.

Changed

• Skill surface consolidated 86 → 59 commands/gsd/*.md entries (#2790) — four new grouped skills replace clusters of micro-skills:

  • capture — folds add-todo (default), note (--note), add-backlog (--backlog), plant-seed (--seed), check-todos (--list)
  • phase — folds add-phase (default), insert-phase (--insert), remove-phase (--remove), edit-phase (--edit)
  • config — folds settings-advanced (--advanced), settings-integrations (--integrations), set-profile (--profile)
  • workspace — folds new-workspace (--new), list-workspaces (--list), remove-workspace (--remove)

  Six existing parents absorb wrap-up and sub-operations as flags: update --sync / --reapply, sketch --wrap-up, spike --wrap-up, map-codebase --fast / --query, code-review --fix, progress --do / --next. Zero functional loss — every removed micro-skill's behavior survives via a flag on a consolidated parent. 31 micro-skills deleted outright; autonomous.md corrected to call gsd:code-review --fix (was invoking deleted gsd:code-review-fix).

• Canary release workflow now publishes from dev branch only (#2868) — .github/workflows/canary.yml swaps its four publish-step guards from refs/heads/main to refs/heads/dev, aligning with the new branch → dist-tag policy (dev → @canary, main → @next / @latest). workflow_dispatch runs on main (or any other branch) now complete build / test / dry-run validation but skip publish + tag, instead of the prior behaviour where main published and dev silently no-op'd.

• PRs missing Closes #NNN are auto-closed (#2872) — the Issue link required workflow now auto-closes any PR opened without a closing keyword that links a tracking issue, posting a comment that points to the contribution guide. Matches the documented project gate.

Fixed

• Gemini slash commands are namespaced as /gsd:<cmd> instead of /gsd-<cmd> (#2768, #2783) — Gemini CLI namespaces commands under gsd: so /gsd-plan-phase was unexecutable. The Gemini install path now converts every body-text reference via a roster-checked regex (boundary lookbehind + extension- aware lookahead + roster lookup, defense-in-depth) and consistently rewrites command files, agent bodies, and final-banner / patch-reapply hints to colon form. The roster fail-loud guard prevents silent no-op'ing if the source commands/gsd/ directory is ever missing.

• GSD slash-command namespace drift cleaned up across docs, workflows and autocomplete (#2858) — remaining stale /gsd:<cmd> references in active surfaces now use canonical /gsd-<cmd>, escaped workflow Skill(skill="gsd:...") prompts now use hyphenated skill names, scripts/fix-slash-commands.cjs rewrites retired colon syntax to hyphen syntax, and the extract- learnings command file is now extract-learnings.md so generated Claude / Qwen skill autocomplete exposes gsd-extract-learnings instead of gsd-extract_learnings.

• SKILL.md description quoted for Copilot / Antigravity / Trae / CodeBuddy (#2876) — descriptions starting with a YAML 1.2 flow indicator ([BETA] …, {, *, &, !, |, >, %, @, backtick) are parsed as flow sequences / mappings by strict YAML loaders and crash gh-copilot's frontmatter loader. Six emission sites now wrap the description in yamlQuote(...) (= JSON.stringify, a valid YAML 1.2 double-quoted scalar). The Claude variant already routed through yamlQuote; the others are now in line.

• gsd-tools invocations use the absolute installed path (#2851) — bare gsd-tools … calls inside skill bodies relied on PATH resolution that is not guaranteed in every runtime; replaced with the absolute path emitted at install time.

• Codex installer preserves trailing newline when stripping legacy hooks (#2866) — the legacy-hook strip in the Codex installer ran against files with no terminating newline at EOF and emitted a config that lost the newline, breaking downstream parsers. Strip path now normalises EOF.

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What was in rc.7

RELEASE-v1.39.0-rc.7.md — first 1.39.0 RC to roll the post-rc.5 fixes from main into the release branch. Includes the extractCurrentMilestone fenced-code-block fix (#2787), audit-uat frontmatter parse fix (#2788), the ≤ 100-char skill description budget + lint gate (#2789), the gsd-sdk workstream + binary-collision fixes (#2791), OpenCode per-tier model overrides (#2794), roadmap update-plan-progress --phase flag handling (#2796), context_window allowlist entry (#2798), /gsd-ingest-docs init dispatch (#2801), config-get --default flag (#2803), find-phase archived-phase null (#2805), SKILL.md hyphen-form name migration (#2808), canary workflow workflow_dispatch (#2828), gsd-sdk local-mode resolve (#2829), OpenCode @file HOME expansion (#2831), gsd-sdk auto Codex detection (#2832), CR-INTEGRATION hyphen alignment (#2835), audit-open SUMMARY filename + UAT terminal status (#2836), SUMMARY rescue with gitignored .planning/ (#2838), transactional cleanup tail for /gsd-code-review-fix (#2839).

What was in rc.5 / rc.6

RELEASE-v1.39.0-rc.5.md and RELEASE-v1.39.0-rc.6.md. rc.6 was a content-identical republish of rc.5; rc.5 hardened the Codex hooks migrator across five edge-cases (#2809).

What was in rc.4

RELEASE-v1.39.0-rc.4.md — the --minimal install flag landed (#2762) along with the Codex ~/.codex/config.toml corruption fix (#2760).

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Installing the pre-release

# npm
npm install -g get-shit-done-cc@next

# npx (one-shot)
npx get-shit-done-cc@next

To pin to this exact RC:

npm install -g get-shit-done-cc@1.40.0-rc.1

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What's next

• Soak rc.1 against real installs across Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Gemini, OpenCode, and Antigravity runtimes.
• Wire write-side phase-lifecycle status-line on top of the #2833 read-side.
• Run finalize on the release workflow to promote 1.40.0 to latest once the train has soaked.