Files
msd-core/docs/adr
Tom Boucher 6a9babda69 chore(#2798): declare the eleven reviewer lanes as manifest data (#2837)
* chore(#2798): declare the eleven reviewer lanes as manifest data

Phase 5a of epic #2782, delivering ADR-2782 D9 (roster half) and D3.

- Five reviewers GSD never installs into become lane-only role:reviewer
  capabilities with no runtime body, no runtimeCompat and no install surface:
  gemini, coderabbit, ollama, lm-studio, llama-cpp. Before this they had no
  descriptor at all and lived as a hardcoded NON_RUNTIME_REVIEWER_SLUGS tail,
  which is now deleted outright.
- The six hosts that are ALSO reviewers gain a reviewer body alongside their
  runtime body. Their runtime bodies are byte-identical to next -- verified per
  capability against the git blob, not asserted -- so no install behaviour moves.
- KNOWN_REVIEWER_SLUGS derives from declared bodies via an exported
  deriveReviewerSlugs(registry). hostBehaviors.reviewerCli survives as a derived
  legacy alias for one release; where a capability carries both, the body wins
  and the slug appears once. Alias removal is Phase 7 (#2801).

THE KEYSTONE: the roster is the SAME ELEVEN SLUGS as before -- antigravity,
claude, coderabbit, codex, cursor, gemini, llama_cpp, lm_studio, ollama,
opencode, qwen. This phase changes HOW the roster is derived, not WHO is in it,
and the test asserts that literal list rather than a count.

kimi-code is deliberately NOT declared here. It is net-new with no
invoke_reviewers leg, so declaring it now would make it selectable but not
invocable -- present in --all, selected, emitting an empty section for the whole
5a-to-5b window -- and would break Phase 1's parity assertion. It lands in 5b
alongside the iteration that can run it. Legacy kimi (the Python CLI) is not a
reviewer at all and gains nothing.

The highest-value test is declaredManifestLanesMatchThePhase1Descriptor: it
deep-compares all eleven declared bodies against REVIEWER_LANES field-by-field,
including probe and invoke sub-fields. All eleven are byte-identical, key order
included. The epic's premise is that the manifest and the core descriptor
describe the same lane with NO translation layer, and Phase 2's review already
caught one divergence that every other test missed.

Two ADR corrections folded in, as Phases 1-3 each did:

1. PHASE ORDER. The ADR runs Phase 4 (federated config) before 5a and #2798
   claims a dependency on 4. That is inverted and makes Phase 4 unsatisfiable:
   D9 assigns review.<host>_host to lane capabilities that do not exist until
   THIS phase creates them, and a federated config slice must live inside
   capabilities/<id>/capability.json. Real graph: Phase 2 -> 5a -> 4.
2. #2798's INVENTORY acceptance item is vacuous. The inventory catalogs
   bin/lib/*.cjs modules, not capability directories -- antigravity, opencode
   and qwen appear zero times in it -- and gen-inventory-manifest --check passes
   with the five new dirs and no edit.

Also corrected a stale line in Phase 2's own ADR amendment: it recorded the slug
pattern as /^[a-z][a-z0-9_-]*$/, but Phase 2's security review widened the
shipped pattern to /^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9_-]*$/ to match Phase 1's exported
LANE_SLUG_RE. The prose had not followed the code.

Closes #2798

* fix(#2798): catalogue reviewer capabilities in the generated matrix

The capability matrix rendered exactly two tables, feature and runtime, via
renderTable(caps, role) filtering on c.role === role. ADR-2782 D3 added a THIRD
role, so every role:"reviewer" capability was silently dropped from the
first-party catalogue.

The drift guard did not catch it, and could not: --check compares generated
output against the committed file, and both omitted the five lanes identically,
so it reported "up to date" while five shipped capabilities were invisible in
the one document that is supposed to list what ships. A guard blind to an entire
role is not guarding.

This phase is what exposed it -- it ships the first role:"reviewer"
capabilities -- so it is fixed here rather than deferred (CLAUDE.md: a defect
found while working is fixed in the current change, which overrides
one-concern-per-PR).

Verified red-before-green: with a lane row deleted from the matrix, --check now
exits 1; restored, it exits 0. Before this fix the lanes were absent entirely, so
there was nothing for the guard to compare.

Phase 6 (#2800) still owns enriching the matrix with lane-specific detail
(slug/flag/transport columns) and the locale parity gate. This is the narrower
fix: the capabilities APPEAR at all.

* fix(#2798): close two hardening gaps and record three limits durably

Isolated security review (5 targets, no blockers) reproduced two gaps in the new
deriveReviewerSlugs. Both are unreachable through the checked-in registry -- it is
generated, JSON-sourced and code-reviewed -- but the function is EXPORTED for
reuse and carries no other validation, so it must not depend on its caller.

- A whitespace-only slug passed the length>0 test verbatim and occupied a roster
  entry it could never match. Slugs are now trimmed before the emptiness test. A
  blank body correctly falls through to the legacy alias rather than DROPPING the
  lane, which would have been worse than the blank slug.
- KNOWN_REVIEWER_SLUGS is computed at require() time, so an uncaught throw there
  breaks import for EVERY consumer rather than degrading selection. It is now
  guarded, yielding an empty roster on a malformed registry. That is a visible
  degradation, not a silent one: under D4 an explicitly requested reviewer that
  is unavailable is an ERROR, so /gsd:review --claude against an empty roster
  fails loudly. This also removes an asymmetry -- the sibling capability-trust
  module documents its collectors as TOTAL and wraps them for exactly this reason.

Also records three findings that previously existed ONLY in squash-merged PR
bodies, which is not a durable record:

- ADR-2782 D5 gains an implementation note explaining why the resolved host is
  deliberately EXCLUDED from the disclosure signature. Rule 1 says consent binds
  the resolved host; the loader has no config resolver, so folding it in would
  make the loader and lifecycle compute different signatures for one manifest and
  re-prompt forever. The binding is split: signature covers the SHA-pinned
  manifest fields, the consent record stores the resolved host, and Phase 5b
  re-resolves at invocation -- which is where rule 4 already puts the check. A
  reader comparing rule 1 to the code would otherwise conclude it is unimplemented.
- CONTEXT.md's capability-trust entry still described THREE executable surfaces.
  Phase 3 added the fourth and made that false; corrected here, since it is drift
  this epic introduced rather than Phase 6's new-glossary-term work.
- stableJson documents the NaN/Infinity/undefined -> null signature collision and
  why it is unreachable (JSON grammar has no such literal, so JSON.parse throws
  first). Reachability rests entirely on the ingest path staying JSON.parse-only,
  so the note lives where someone would break it.

* chore(#2798): backfill changeset pr number to 2837
2026-07-29 16:58:02 -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 (53)

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 (command-exit-zero) 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-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-3660 Runtime Artifact Layout Module owns per-runtime artifact placement Accepted ADR-1239

Proposed (8)

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 —

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

69 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).