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* test(#3706): failing-first coverage for OpenCode variant emission and frontmatter escaping * fix(#3706): emit the resolved reasoning effort as OpenCode's variant key `query resolve-execution` resolved an effort level for every agent, but the OpenCode bake wrote only `model:` — the effort never reached the generated agent, so subagents ran at whatever the runtime defaulted the model to. This is the effort-side twin of the model-side defect fixed in #3705. The key is written only when an `effort` block is actually configured. `resolveInstallTimeEffort` always returns a level (the catalog default is `high`), so gating on its return value would stamp `variant: high` into every existing OpenCode install — and OpenCode resolves a variant name against a `variants` map in the user's `opencode.jsonc`, so a value nobody declared is not a safe default. Gating on `readGsdEffectiveEffortConfig` keeps installs that never asked for effort routing byte-identical. Kilo does not receive the key: `EFFORT_ARGV` declares surfaces for claude, opencode and codex and has no kilo entry. This is deliberately asymmetric with the model side, where #2794 J8 requires the two runtimes to resolve alike. Both frontmatter sinks now route through `frontmatterScalar`, which quotes and escapes any value that is not a plain scalar. The raw interpolation predates this change, but it was already shown by execution during the #3705 security review to let a config value containing a newline inject additional top-level keys (`tools:`, `permission:`) into a generated agent file. This change adds a second write to that sink, so it is closed here rather than doubled. * fix(#3706): quote frontmatter values YAML would not read back verbatim Self-review of the predicate added in the previous commit. Treating /^[A-Za-z0-9._:/@+-]+$/ as 'safe to emit bare' answers the wrong question: a value can match it and still not round-trip. - A leading '@' is a YAML *reserved* indicator and may not open a plain scalar at all, so a scoped ID like '@org/model' emitted bare is a parse error, not an ambiguity — the whole agent file becomes unreadable. - 'no' / 'y' / 'off' / 'null' resolve to booleans and null, so a variant with one of those names would match no entry in the user's variants map. - '12:30' resolves to 750 under YAML 1.1 sexagesimal, and ':' is legal mid-identifier here, so the form is reachable rather than contrived. Real model IDs pass every clause and stay bare, so already-generated files remain byte-identical. * fix(#3706): route variant through the declared effort seam and cover the live path Addresses six findings from the isolated review, all confirmed by execution. The tests were the serious one: they required `../bin/install.js` while the fix landed in src/, which compiles to gsd-core/bin/lib/. They exercised a different copy of the converter than the one the bake actually uses, so the whole suite was green-by-construction against unchanged code and the remote run failed all 13. Every case now runs against BOTH copies from one table, which doubles as the parity assertion the generative-fix note in runtime-artifact-conversion.cts asks for, and bin/install.js carries the mirrored change. Emission no longer hand-rolls the value. It goes through `renderEffortArgv`, the declared OpenCode effort seam (EFFORT_ARGV.opencode: its own supported set and clamp). That is what rejects a level that is not a wire value — above all `inherit`, which per #3533 (10d) means "omit the key and follow the host default" and was previously written literally, naming a variant that cannot resolve. Reachable two ways, both now pinned: an agent_overrides entry and a routing_tier_defaults entry. A bare effort.default does NOT reach a tiered agent (the #3531 tier ladder answers first), so a test written against `default` alone asserts nothing — that is pinned too. The plain-scalar decision moved into frontmatter.cts beside `scalarNeedsDoubleQuoting` rather than sitting next to it as a second, weaker predicate. `agentScalarNeedsDoubleQuoting` is a documented superset: it adds a trailing `:` (read as a nested mapping key, which fails the whole frontmatter), boolean/null words, and numeric-looking values including YAML 1.1 sexagesimal. Docs now state the cascade plainly: the gate is on effort being configured at all, not on the individual agent being named, so every generated OpenCode agent gets a variant line once any effort block exists. * test(#3706): assert the two frontmatterScalar copies cannot diverge A hand-picked adversarial corpus plus a fast-check property over YAML-significant strings, both run against bin/install.js and the live src copy. Verified the property can actually fail: mutating one copy's quoting rule is killed well inside the run budget. * fix(#3706): close the review findings — predicate, seam, and dead mirror Third review round; every item below was confirmed by execution. The scalar predicate was wrong in two families, both found by a round-trip property test rather than by reading. Basing it on scalarNeedsDoubleQuoting dropped the "first character must be alphanumeric" clause, so `~`, `.inf`, `.nan`, `+1`, `-0` and `.5` went out bare and came back as null/floats/ints; and that base predicate only inspects the FIRST character, so an embedded `: ` (a nested mapping, i.e. a parse error) or ` #` (a comment, i.e. silent truncation) also passed. Dates round out the set: `2026-08-25` opens alphanumeric, survives every other clause, and YAML resolves it to a Date. The property now asserts the contract directly over generated values instead of trusting an enumerated character list. The bin/install.js mirror is gone. Its premise was false — install.js already requires bin/lib at :65 — and it was unreachable besides: install.js's convertClaudeToOpencodeFrontmatter has no `isAgent: true` call site, because its agents path resolves converters from the compiled module. It was a third copy of the YAML rules serving a test rather than a caller, so the file is back to origin/next and the tests target the live copy only. Effort clamping moved to `clampEffortForHost`, which renderEffortArgv now delegates to. The layout was calling renderEffortArgv with a hardcoded 'argv' to borrow its clamp, which read as if the frontmatter key were gated on the invocation-time axis. It is not: claude declares effortSurface "argv" and independently bakes an effort: key. One capability table, one clamp, two channels that no longer pretend to be each other. Also corrects an earlier claim of mine: adding EFFORT_RENDERING.opencode would NOT have made `effort sync` write the wrong key, because it guards on the runtime name before it ever renders. The seam choice stands on other grounds. `effort sync` still skips OpenCode, but its stated reason claimed OpenCode "does not use effort: frontmatter", which this change makes false — so the message now says what is actually true. * docs(#3706): restate the changeset around the round-trip contract * fix(#3706): restore the changeset fragment belonging to #3809 An earlier commit in this branch picked the first file in .changeset/ by glob order instead of the fragment created for this issue, and overwrote agile-geese-squeak.md (PR 3815 / #3809) with this change's body. Restored verbatim from origin/next; this change's text now lives in its own patient-cranes-parade.md, where it was created. * feat(#3706): maintain the OpenCode variant key from effort sync Install bakes the resolved effort into OpenCode agent frontmatter as `variant:`, so `effort sync` has to maintain it or a config change only takes effect on reinstall — and its skip message claimed OpenCode does not use frontmatter effort at all, which this issue made false. cmdEffortSyncOpencode mirrors the codex branch: resolve per agent, clamp through the declared OpenCode capability, then write, strip, or skip. A null target means the key must not exist, which covers both "no effort configured" and "resolved to inherit or to an unsupported level" — the same states under which install writes nothing, so sync and install agree by construction. The frontmatter line-editors are key-parameterised rather than copied: setEffortFrontmatter / removeEffortFrontmatter are now thin wrappers over the same internals the variant path uses, and a test pins that the claude `effort:` behavior did not move. The child-process test harness fixes both HOME and USERPROFILE, so the hermetic-config assertions cannot pass vacuously on Windows. * fix(#3706): scope the frontmatter line editors to the matched block Found by the security review of the sync path, reported as correctness rather than vulnerability, and reproduced against pre-fix code before being fixed. Both editors matched the frontmatter with a regex that can match a block after a preamble, then derived the EOL and the opening-fence length from the START OF THE FILE. On a CRLF document with a preamble those disagree, the offsets shift by one byte, and the reassembled document comes back with a mangled fence (`---\rname: x`). Both now take the EOL from the matched block. `setFrontmatterKeyLine` additionally did a whole-file `/m` replace when the key already existed, gated only on the key being present in the frontmatter body — so a preamble line starting with the same key was rewritten instead of the frontmatter one. It now replaces inside the frontmatter span only, which is the hazard `removeFrontmatterKeyLine` already documented and guarded against. Neither is reachable from an install-written `gsd-*.md` (those begin at byte 0 with `---`), and both predate this change — but the editors are in this diff because #3706 key-parameterised them, so they are fixed here rather than left for the next caller to trip over. Three regression tests, each confirmed to fail against the pre-fix build. * fix(#3706): treat a present-but-empty key as present, and pin the real seam Fourth review round. The MAJOR one: both sync branches read the current value with `(.+?)`, which needs at least one character, so a key present with an EMPTY value read as "key absent". When the target was also null the code concluded "already correct" and skipped — leaving the key in the file, where it reads back as YAML `null`: exactly the unresolvable-variant state this change exists to prevent. Whitespace decided whether it fired, since `variant: ` matched and `variant:` did not. Presence and value are now separate questions at both the opencode and the claude branch. The OpenCode writer now follows the codex branch rather than the claude one: tmp file plus retryRenameSync with orphan cleanup, and a write failure skips that agent and is reported instead of aborting the sweep. Same granularity, same transient-Windows-lock exposure, so the hardened sibling was the right precedent. Also: the generic line-editors escape their interpolated key, the JSDoc stranded by the clampEffortForHost extraction is back on renderEffortArgv, and a cast that declared a nullable function as non-nullable is corrected. Tests close the gaps the review listed — empty value (both spellings), CRLF round-trip through write and strip, the symlink guard, a body line starting `variant:`, a file with no frontmatter, and the YAML classes that actually broke the predicate. The new layout-seam test drives the real stage() path and was verified to FAIL when `variant` is removed from the converter call; a seam test that survives cutting the seam is worse than none. * fix(#3706): clear the round-five review findings No blockers or majors this round; the repo's review gate is zero-tolerance, so the minors are cleared too. A duplicated key was only half-stripped: the strip regex had no `g` flag, so a frontmatter carrying the key twice lost one occurrence, reported success, and left the "a null target means the key must not exist" invariant false on disk — converging only on a second run. Such a document is already invalid YAML, so this is robustness rather than a live corruption path, but a successful sync has to leave the invariant true. A run in which every write failed still summarised as `ok`, so a caller could not tell "nothing to do" from "everything failed". The OpenCode branch now reports `failed` when any write failed. The write-failure path was also the newest code in the change with no coverage at all; it now has a test that injects the failure by monkeypatching the write, per CLAUDE.md §4, rather than by chmod — mode bits do not bite under root in CI. `CodexEffortSyncWriteFailure` is renamed `EffortSyncWriteFailure` now that two branches share it. Removed a guard on the claude concrete path that was provably unreachable — no member of EFFORT_SET renders null there, so it read as protection that did not exist. The claude inherit path's presence check is load-bearing and untouched. Three stale statements corrected: the OpenCode result shape matches codex's, not claude's, now that it emits write_failures; the `thread()` test helper now calls `clampEffortForHost` so it genuinely mirrors the layout instead of merely claiming to; and a test helper restored `USERPROFILE` by assignment, writing the literal string "undefined" into the environment on POSIX — it deletes now. * fix(#3706): converge the set path, degrade on unreadable files, preserve mode Rounds five and six of review. No blockers or majors; the review gate is zero-tolerance, so the minors are cleared too. `setFrontmatterKeyLine` was the mirror of a defect already fixed in its sibling: `remove` was made global, `set` was not, so on a frontmatter carrying the key twice it rewrote the first and left a stale second. Last-wins YAML readers honour the stale value while the sync's own first-occurrence read reports "in sync" — permanently non-converging. It now collapses to exactly one occurrence, in the position of the first, so ordinary single-occurrence documents stay byte-identical (verified across seven shapes before and after). An unreadable agent file used to throw and abort the entire sweep, while a failed WRITE in the same loop degraded into a report. The OpenCode branch now reports read failures alongside write failures; the claude branch degrades to a skip without a new result field, because its shape is long-standing and widely consumed and one bad file aborting the sweep is the actual defect. The tmp+rename publish dropped the original file's mode — a plain writeFileSync preserves it, a rename does not — so a 0600 agent came back 0644. Both the OpenCode and the codex branch now carry the original's permission bits across the publish, masked with 0o7777: the raw stat mode includes the file-type bits, and POSIX leaves those unspecified for chmod. Linux is the only OS the remote matrix runs, so relying on Darwin's tolerance would have been untestable here. Also documents the `from` contract on EffortSyncChange (null means the key was absent, '' means present with an empty value — a distinction earlier rounds introduced and then collapsed in the output), adds OpenCode to the docs paragraph enumerating where the key is omitted under inherit, and records in a comment that the 'failed' summary reaches only raw mode and does not change the exit code, which is a CLI-contract change affecting all three branches and is deliberately not made here. * fix(#3706): guard the codex read, close the tmp permission window, rename the failure type Round seven, plus one thing I found myself. `cmdEffortSyncCodex` still had an unguarded `fs.readFileSync` — a read fault on one agent exited 1 and aborted the whole sweep. The claude and opencode branches were both guarded earlier this round and codex was missed, with the unguarded read sitting ten lines above the chmod block the previous commit did edit. It now reports read failures the way the OpenCode branch does, and a read failure flips its summary to `failed` — which write failures did not do there either, so both are corrected for consistency. The tmp file was created at the default mode and only tightened afterwards, so a 0600 agent's contents sat in a 0644 file for the length of the publish. I measured the window rather than assuming it, then closed it by passing the mode at creation. The chmod after the write is deliberately RETAINED and commented: the `mode` option only applies when the file is actually created, so a leftover tmp from an earlier crashed run would be truncated and reused at its old mode, and the chmod is what corrects that. `EffortSyncWriteFailure` is renamed `EffortSyncFileFailure` — it was typing a `read_failures` array, the same naming-lie the `Codex…` prefix had last round. Also pins the codex mode preservation with a test. It only writes on a path that genuinely rewrites the file, so the fixture is an Anthropic-flavoured model pin the sync strips, and the test asserts the content changed before checking the mode — otherwise it would pass on a sync that did nothing. * fix(#3706): guard the claude writes and share one escaping rule The security sign-off caught a comment of mine that was factually wrong: the new claude read guard said the failure is folded in "like the write path in this same loop does", and there was no write guard in that loop. Rather than correct the sentence, both claude write sites are now guarded the way the read is — a failed file is skipped, the sweep continues, and the raw summary token flips to `failed`. The JSON shape stays frozen deliberately, because it is long-standing and widely consumed; the token is the channel that can carry the signal without a compatibility risk, which is the reviewer's own suggestion. That makes all three branches consistent: reads and writes guarded everywhere, per-file failures degrade instead of aborting, and every branch reports `failed` rather than `ok` when something did not sync. `setFrontmatterKeyLine` interpolated its value raw while the install-side writer quoted through the shared helpers — two writers of the same frontmatter key disagreeing on escaping, the divergence class this repo requires closed. They now share one rule. Verified no churn: all six effort levels are plain scalars and emit byte-identically, with claude's documented minimal-to-low clamp the only difference in the table, exactly as before. * fix(#3706): publish claude agent writes atomically too Both reviewers found this independently, and it is data loss rather than a reporting gap. The claude branch wrote in place, so `fs.writeFileSync`'s O_TRUNC meant a post-open fault left the agent file truncated or half-written: an injected ENOSPC produced an empty file, and under `ulimit -f` a 60000-byte agent came back as 512 bytes of wrong content. The guard added earlier this round then counted that destroyed file as `skipped`, which in JSON mode is indistinguishable from "already in sync" — so a caller would have read the sweep as clean while an agent on disk was corrupt. It now publishes the way the codex and opencode branches already do: write to a tmp file created at the original's masked mode, chmod, then retryRenameSync, with the tmp unlinked and the agent skipped on any failure. The corrupting case is gone rather than merely reported, which matters because this branch deliberately takes no new result key. I had claimed all three branches were consistent after the previous commit. That was true for degradation and reporting and not for atomicity; the reviewer caught the overclaim. It is true now. Also sorts the claude file list, which the other two branches already did — readdir order is platform-dependent, so leaving it unsorted made the reported `changes` ordering differ across machines for identical inputs. * chore(#3706): backfill the changeset PR number pr:0 placeholder replaced with the real PR now that gh api returned it. * test(#3706): kill the frontmatter mutants this change introduced CI's Stryker frontmatter shard scored 60.58 against a break floor of 62. The cause is documented in the lane's own config, from #1882: this PR added a multi-clause predicate to frontmatter.cts and exported the escaper, but the tests constraining them live in tests/runtime-converters.test.cjs, which that shard does not run — so every mutant in the new code was uncovered there even though the behaviour is tested elsewhere. The fix is assertions that kill real mutants, per the repo's own instruction, not a lowered floor and not a Stryker disable: scripts/mutation-matrix.cjs is untouched. Each clause of agentScalarNeedsDoubleQuoting now has a true case AND a near-miss that must answer the opposite way, so flipping the clause fails a specific named test — alnum-first against `a-b`, trailing `:` against `foo:bar`, embedded `: ` against `a:b`, embedded ` #` against `a#b`, the word list against `yes1`/`nullish`, the numeric forms against `1a`/`0xzz`, the timestamp against `2026-08-25x`, plus the case-insensitive spellings that pin the `i` flag. escapeDoubleQuoted is pinned on exact output, including a case constructed so that escaping in the wrong ORDER yields a different string. Two of my expectations were wrong and are asserted as the code actually behaves: `12:99` is NOT quoted, because the sexagesimal alternative never range-checks minutes and so does not match — which is right, since YAML would not read it as sexagesimal either; and `20260825` is quoted by the numeric clause rather than the timestamp one, being a bare integer. * chore(#3706): ratchet the frontmatter mutation floor to 65 The lane measured 66.67 on PR 3867 after the mutant-killing unit tests landed — above its pre-change 63.35 baseline, not merely recovered. Step 3 of this file's own HOW TO UPDATE procedure says to set minScore = floor(measured) - 1 in the same diff, so 62 becomes 65 and the improvement is locked in rather than left free to slide back. The ledger of measured scores now records the new measurement, why the shard broke in the first place (logic added to frontmatter.cts whose only tests lived in a file this lane does not run — the same trap the #1882 note describes), and one discrepancy: step 3 also says to update "the matching RATCHET_BASELINE entry", but no such declaration exists in this file. The name appears only in that comment, so minScore and the ledger are all there is to update. * fix(#3706): update RATCHET_BASELINE alongside the raised floor The ratchet test caught the previous commit: it raised COVERED['frontmatter'] .minScore to 65 without updating the baseline that mirrors it, which is exactly the mismatch that guard exists to make visible in review. I had claimed RATCHET_BASELINE did not exist. It does — in tests/mutation-matrix-ratchet.test.cjs, not in scripts/mutation-matrix.cjs, which is the only file I searched before concluding it was a stale reference. The ledger comment is corrected to say where it lives and to record that the guard caught the error rather than leaving my wrong claim on the record. * docs(#3706): put the mutation ledger entries back under their own dates The 2026-08-25 measurement was spliced into the middle of the 2026-06-14 list, so adr-parser, config-schema, active-workstream-store and core-utils ended up sitting under the wrong heading and misattributing their measurement dates. That ledger is what a future change reads to calibrate a floor, so a wrong date there is not cosmetic. Each measurement is now under the date it was taken. Also drops the first-person account of my own mistake from the entry — the factual half (where RATCHET_BASELINE lives, and that it is updated in the same diff) is what a reader needs; the confession is not. --------- Co-authored-by: sim <sim@local>
GSD Core
Git. Ship. Done.
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A light-weight meta-prompting, context engineering, and spec-driven development system for Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity CLI, Kimi CLI, Kilo, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, and more.
What is GSD Core
GSD Core is a context-engineering and spec-driven development framework that drives AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity CLI, Kimi CLI, Copilot, Cursor, and more) through a disciplined phase loop. It solves context rot — the quality degradation that accumulates as an AI fills its context window — by running all heavy research, planning, and execution work in fresh-context subagents while keeping your main session lean.
How it works
Each milestone repeats the same five-step loop, one phase at a time:
- Discuss — capture implementation decisions before anything is planned
- Plan — research, decompose, and verify the plan fits a fresh context window
- Execute — run plans in parallel waves; each executor starts with a clean 200k-token context
- Verify — walk through what was built; diagnose and fix before declaring done
- Ship — create the PR, archive the phase, repeat for the next one
Quickstart
npx @opengsd/gsd-core@latest
The installer prompts for your runtime (Claude Code, OpenCode, Antigravity CLI, Kimi CLI, Kilo, Codex, Copilot, Cursor, Windsurf, and more) and whether to install globally or locally. The installer is required for cross-runtime compatibility — do not copy files from agents/ or commands/ directly.
On another runtime or without Node.js? See Install on your runtime.
Once installed, start a new project or onboard an existing repo:
/gsd-new-project # greenfield project
/gsd-onboard # existing codebase
New here? Follow Your first project for a guided walkthrough from install to first shipped phase, or Onboarding an existing codebase for brownfield setup.
Documentation
What's new in 1.7.0 → docs/whats-new-1.7.0.md
Tutorials — learning by doing:
How-to guides — task-focused recipes:
Reference — authoritative facts:
Explanation — concepts and design decisions:
Full index: docs/README.md. Other languages: 日本語 · 한국어 · Português · 简体中文.
Why it works
Most AI-coding setups fail at scale because context bloat silently degrades output quality, there is no shared memory between sessions, and nothing verifies that code actually works. GSD Core solves all three: heavy work runs in fresh subagents, structured artifacts like STATE.md and CONTEXT.md survive session boundaries, and the verify step walks through what was built and generates fix plans before a phase is declared done. See docs/explanation/context-engineering.md for the full reasoning.
Troubleshooting? See docs/how-to/recover-and-troubleshoot.md.
Community
| Project | Platform |
|---|---|
| gsd-opencode | Original OpenCode port |
| Discord | Community support |
Star History
License
MIT License. See LICENSE for details.
Claude Code is powerful. GSD Core makes it reliable.