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* docs(#3812): say that Current Position is single-valued, and pin the behavior that makes it true #3812 shipped CLOSED with half its acceptance unmet. #3873 delivered cardinality for FRONTMATTER keys - current_phase/current_plan render as optional at docs/reference/state-md.md:89,91, covered by tests/gen-state-md-docs.test.cjs:374. The issue's actual ask was the ## Current Position BODY section, and that never landed. Surfaced by an /adr-phase-coverage audit of epic #3473; the issue was reopened rather than noted. The section now states three things: every field is single-valued, the section is overwritten rather than appended to, and a duplicate resolves to the FIRST occurrence with no warning - so a line appended in good faith is silently ignored rather than winning. Progress history belongs in ## Performance Metrics, two headings down, and the text now points there. The third claim is a behavioral promise about the reader, so it was VERIFIED BY EXECUTION before being written rather than inferred from the issue title: stateExtractField(<"Phase: 1 of 5 (First)" ... "Phase: 9 of 9 (Appended later)">, "Phase") -> "1 of 5 (First)" The mechanism is state-document.cjs:405 - the plain-line pattern ^<field>:[ \t]*(.+) carries flags im with NO g, so String.match returns the first hit. Writing "first wins" without running it would have repeated the exact error I had to retract twice in this epic already. A test pins the reader, not the prose. Three rows in tests/state.test.cjs: T1 (load-bearing) asserts the duplicated case resolves first; T2 asserts the ordinary single-field case still works, so a fix that only functions when duplicated cannot pass; T3 puts a Plan: line BETWEEN the two Phase: lines and asserts it resolves independently - negative space, because a reader returning the first line of the SECTION rather than the first matching FIELD would satisfy T1 alone. Proven to discriminate: a last-match variant returns "9 of 9 (Appended later)" and T1 reds. No assertion checks that the document contains a sentence. That is what local/no-source-grep exists to stop, and it would pin wording that is allowed to improve. The point of the test is that if that regex ever gains g and a last-match walk, the test fails - instead of the documentation quietly becoming a lie with nothing to notice. Prose only, no new heading. docs-state-md-locale-parity compares heading-level sequences by LCS rather than text, so added paragraphs cannot fail it while an added HEADING would fail all four locales. The constraint is structural, not stylistic - confirmed by running that comparison after the edit. The four locale copies are translated rather than left stale. They are not gate-enforced for prose, so "nothing fails" was available and is not the same as correct: leaving four documents asserting something the English one now contradicts is a correctness problem. Code spans and the anchor link stay untranslated - they name real tokens. The whole approach rests on one fact, checked first: ## Current Position at :196-208 sits OUTSIDE every generated marker region (:81-104, :138-151), so a hand edit survives --write. Re-confirmed after all five edits - gen-state-md-docs --check reports all 6 targets up to date. Had that been false the fix would have belonged in the generator, and a hand edit would have been silently reverted. One real gate failure fixed inline rather than reported: the new test's comments referenced docs/reference/state-md.md, which was not in that file's registered exempt-docs paths, and lint-docs-guard-registration failed lint:ci correctly. Registered. Known limit, named rather than folded in: gsd-tools validate/health still do NOT warn on a duplicated Phase:. #3812 records that as a "consider", not a requirement, and confirms none of the nine rules in src/health-diagnostic-rules/{state-consistency,phase-structure}.cts counts occurrences. Documenting the silent first-match is the delivered scope; making it loud is new scope and stays unclaimed. Closes #3812 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(#3812): the rule I documented was false — replace it with the measured one An isolated review returned two blockers. Both mine, and the first is the worse kind: I wrote a falsifiable rule into a reference page and got it wrong. 1. "A duplicate resolves to the FIRST occurrence" is FALSE. stateExtractField (src/state-document.cts:401-419) tries BOLD `**F:**` across the whole input, THEN plain `^F:`, THEN a pipe-table row. Form precedence beats document order. Measured against the built reader, all intra-section: Phase: A (plain) / **Phase:** B (bold, later) -> B LATER WINS Phase: A (indented) / Phase: B (plain, later) -> B LATER WINS Phase: A (plain) / | Phase | T (table) | -> A first wins My original verification tested plain-versus-plain, saw first-wins, and generalized to all forms. Measuring one case and claiming the general rule is the same error I have had to retract twice already in this epic. It is also worse than silence. The sentence told authors an appended line is safely ignored; a bold line appended "for emphasis" silently overrides the original. Someone trusting the doc would have corrupted their own state file. And #3812 never asked for a resolution rule - it asked for single-valued, overwrite-not-append, and where history goes. The rule was my unrequested addition. Replaced with the measured truth: resolution is by FORM (bold anywhere, then plain at line-start, then table row), and only WITHIN the winning form does the first occurrence win. Both consequences stated plainly - a higher-ranked form wins regardless of position, and an indented `Phase:` is invisible to the plain form. All five claims in the new paragraph verified by execution before being written, including the two I had wrong. 2. The tests tested the wrong case and passed for the wrong reason. T1/T3 put the second `Phase:` under `## Somewhere else` - the INTER-section case, which #2956 already fixed by scoping. #3812 says verbatim that #2956 "fixed the inter-section case and never addressed intra-section duplication", so the case the new prose describes was untested, and the fixtures passed because of section scoping rather than field resolution. They also called bare stateExtractField rather than the production chain, T2 could not discriminate first from last at all, and no fixture mixed forms - which is precisely why the false claim survived to review. Rewritten as four rows, all intra-section, all through the real stateCurrentPositionSlice -> stateExtractField path: plain-then-plain (first wins within a form), plain-then-bold (the bold LATER value wins - the row whose absence let the false claim ship), indented-then-plain (indented invisible), and sibling-field independence. Each proven to fail against a reader that disagrees. 3. Two dead anchors. pt-BR and zh-CN linked `#performance-metrics` while their own headings are `### Métricas de Desempenho` and `### 性能指标`. Both fixed to the anchor their own heading generates. ja-JP/ko-KR kept the English heading, so theirs already resolved. 4. A ja/ko sentence inverted its own meaning. Both rendered "which is the section designed to grow" with a bare demonstrative whose nearest referent read as Current Position - saying the opposite of the point. Rewritten so the clause attaches unambiguously to `## Performance Metrics`. 5. Cross-locale drift, flagged by the implementing agent rather than by me: after fixing EN, the four locales still stated the OLD false rule. Four documents asserting something measured to be wrong is worse than four saying nothing. All four now carry a faithful translation of the corrected paragraph, with code spans, each file's own anchor, and the ja/ko referent fix preserved. Verified: all five claims executed against the built reader; every rewritten test row proven to discriminate; gen-state-md-docs --check reports all 6 targets up to date, so the edits stay outside the generated marker regions; locale heading parity unaffected (prose only, no headings added); build:lib, lint and lint:ci all exit 0. Refs #3812 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(#3812): second false rule on the same page — scope the ranking to the section A second isolated review found a second false falsifiable claim, and the failure mode is the same one twice in a row: attempt 1: verified plain-vs-plain, wrote a claim about ALL FORMS attempt 2: verified bare stateExtractField, wrote a claim about THE DOCUMENT Both times the claim covered a wider surface than what was actually executed. The fix each time was not a better sentence, it was executing the surface the sentence describes. BLOCKER — "bold `**Phase:**` anywhere in the DOCUMENT wins" is false. ## Current Position / Phase: 1 of 5 + ## Archive / **Phase:** 88 bare stateExtractField(whole doc) -> "88 (other section)" PRODUCTION (slice then extract) -> "1 of 5 (in section)" #2956's section slice means production never hands another section to the matcher; a bold line in `## Archive`, or in the YAML frontmatter, is simply not seen. The ranking is real but scoped: it applies WITHIN `## Current Position`. I verified against the bare function and wrote a claim about the system. Every existing test placed its bold line inside the section, which is exactly why nothing contradicted the claim. T5 now puts a bold `**Phase:**` in `## Archive` and asserts production returns the in-section plain value, with the unscoped reader asserted to DISAGREE so the row proves the scoping rather than assuming it. BLOCKER — the changeset still shipped the ORIGINAL retracted claim. I corrected the page and left the release note saying "resolves to the first occurrence ... a second entry added in good faith is silently ignored". The note contradicted the page it announces, and the release note is what most people actually read. Rewritten to the corrected rule. MEDIUM — the concession was inverted. It read "wins even if it comes FIRST in the file", which is the vacuous direction; the surprising case, and the one the very next clause illustrates with an APPENDED bold line, is "even if it comes LAST". All four locales reproduced the inversion faithfully, so it was an EN-source defect rather than translation drift. Two sharp edges now named, both measured: a bold `**Phase:**` followed only by trailing spaces resolves to an EMPTY STRING and does not fall through to a valid plain line below (T6 pins it); and `| **Phase:** | 3 of 4 |` short-circuits to the bold form and returns the literal `"| 3 of 4 |"`. A page that teaches form ranking has to say where the ranking bites. Also fixed: all five files labelled the link `## Performance Metrics` while the heading is `### Performance Metrics`. Anchors resolved correctly everywhere; only the label's level was wrong. Every clause in the final paragraph re-verified through the PRODUCTION chain (stateCurrentPositionSlice -> stateExtractField), clause by clause, before being written: bold in another section does not win; bold in frontmatter does not win; bold appended last does win; first wins within one form; trailing-space bold yields empty. All four locales carry the same corrected rule. gen-state-md-docs --check reports all 6 targets up to date; heading counts unchanged at 20/20 across all five files, so locale heading-parity is untouched; build:lib, lint and lint:ci all exit 0. Refs #3812 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * chore(#3812): backfill changeset pr number Refs #3812 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> --------- Co-authored-by: sim <sim@local> Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
GSD Core documentation
Documentation is organised into four quadrants: tutorials help you learn by doing, how-to guides solve specific tasks, reference states authoritative facts, and explanation explores concepts and design decisions.
Language versions: English · Português (pt-BR) · 日本語 · 简体中文
Tutorials
- Your first project — install to first shipped phase, one guaranteed path
- Onboarding an existing codebase — bring GSD Core to a brownfield repo
- Build your first capability — author a tiny declarative capability and watch it act in the loop
- Install your first capability — install a third-party capability end-to-end: consent, verify, check for updates, remove
How-to guides
- Install on your runtime — runtime-specific install steps for all 16 supported runtimes
- Install a minimal GSD and add skills later — install only the core skills, then grow the surface with profiles and
/gsd-surface - Attach a plugin-provided skill to a GSD agent — use the
global:plugin:skillentry form to load Claude Code plugin skills into agent prompts - Discuss a phase — capture implementation decisions before planning begins
- Resolve edge-coverage findings — turn the spec phase's surfaced domain-boundary edges into covered, dismissed, or backstopped spec decisions
- Probe edges in a non-English project — get real edge coverage on a spec written in another language, and tell "no edges here" apart from "the probe could not read it"
- Resolve prohibition findings — turn the spec phase's surfaced must-NOT constraints into resolved, dismissed, or deferred spec decisions
- Resolve an unreachable-workflow finding — wire or fully sweep a shipped workflow that no command, agent, or skill references
- Acknowledge emitted-artifact drift — declare a deliberate emitted-byte ripple or workflow/agent growth in a commit trailer, and migrate an older ack fragment
- Change the STATE.md schema — add, change or remove a STATE.md frontmatter key and keep the template and all five reference documents in step
- Resolve verify-command path findings — fix an
<automated>verify command whose target directory does not resolve from the executor's cwd - State a failing direction — say what output constitutes failure for an
<automated>verify command, and migrate a phase planned before the rule - Resolve a contract-drift finding — bring an agent's completion contract, read-tag gate, or deleted-file test reference back into agreement with the registry
- Resolve unreachable-guard findings — fix shell guards whose fallback arm cannot run, and tell "nothing to report" apart from "could not look"
- Declare a hook's crash policy — terminate a GSD hook with
allow/deny/crash, declare itsON_CRASHpolicy, and tell a hook's own crash apart from a check that could not run at all - Resolve a skipped capability probe — act on a coverage gate that held your phase for an unestablished scope, or a planning checkpoint that reported
skippedinstead of a verdict - Diagnose which gsd-tools is running — tell this package's tool apart from the predecessor's colliding binary and from a gsd-core too old to identify itself
- Resolve an ESLint glob-coverage finding — bring a source file that matches no lint rule under coverage, or record a reasoned exemption
- Resolve a raw-terminator finding — pick
runMain/ExitError,terminateNow, orprocess.exitCodefor alocal/require-registered-exitfinding, and know the two allowlist entries and the rule's documented evasions - Adopt the v2 exit contract — turn on
gsd-tools's versioned exit-code projection, read the code table including what80(DEGRADED) means, and migrate a CI gate that treats any non-zero exit as fatal - Read the statusline freshness marker — turn on
state ~N commits back, and tell "STATE.md is fresh" apart from "freshness could not be established" - Consume the planning snapshot — read
planning inspectfrom a dashboard or harness, and tell "nothing to report" apart from "could not look" - Consume the state contract — read
.planning/state.jsonfrom a workbench or editor extension, gate on the contract version, and tell "nothing to show" apart from "could not look" - Keep planning docs out of a shared repo — make
.planning/local-only, including untracking files git already tracks (the step.gitignorealone cannot do) - Publish PRs without planning artifacts — keep
.planning/committed locally, so worktrees and/gsd-undokeep working, whileplanning.pr_strictkeeps every planning path out of the branch you push - Plan a phase — run research, decompose work, and verify plan quality
- Verify a dependency-compatibility claim — act on a compatibility claim the researcher left
[ASSUMED], and tell "nothing declared" apart from "a constraint is declared" and "the lookup failed" - Execute a phase — run plans in parallel waves with fresh-context subagents
- Enable parallel reviewer lanes — cut a multi-reviewer
/gsd-reviewpass toward its slowest lane, and tell a rate-limited lane apart from one that was never selected - Verify and ship — walk through completed work, diagnose failures, and create the PR
- Catch complexity before it compounds — enable the post-execute refactor hook, read a proposal's score vs. anchor delta, and accept or decline it
- Run phases autonomously — use autonomous mode for unattended phase execution
- Handle quick and fast tasks — use
/gsd-quickand/gsd-fastfor ad-hoc work outside the phase loop - Configure model profiles — switch between quality, balanced, and budget model tiers
- Control which host runtime GSD reports — read the
agent_runtimeladder, understand what host detection looks at, and pin the runtime when detection is not what you want - Set up cross-AI review — configure a second AI to review code produced by the primary agent
- Scope code review depth by path — escalate
/gsd-code-reviewtodeepfor sensitive directories while the rest of the repo stays at the default depth - Work in parallel with workstreams — run independent lines of work simultaneously using workstreams
- Isolate work with workspaces — use workspaces to sandbox experimental or risky changes
- Debug a failed execution — diagnose and recover from broken or incomplete phase execution
- Interpret scope-conformance warnings — read the advisory the worktree-wave merge emits when a plan branch commits outside its declared scope
- Interpret install-shadow warnings — read the advisory GSD Core emits when a
/gsd-*trigger is installed at both scopes and one silently wins, and tell "nothing to report" apart from "could not look" - Interpret
state validateresults — read thescopereason codes and tell "nothing to report" apart from "could not look" - Spike and sketch — use
/gsd-spikeand/gsd-sketchfor exploratory work before committing to a plan - Design a UI phase — use the UI phase loop for frontend and visual work
- Enable live-DOM verification — opt a project into browser-backed UI acceptance checks during execution, handle the browser-profile lock, and tell "nothing to report" apart from "could not look"
- Develop a Capability for GSD 1.5+ — add feature Capabilities, hook fragments, and registry entries
- Develop a task-content resolver capability — declare a
taskContentResolversoexecute-plan.mdresolves per-task content from your external issue tracker instead ofPLAN.md - Ship a reviewer lane in your capability — declare a
reviewerbody so/gsd-reviewdiscovers, invokes, and renders your external review CLI or model endpoint - List your reviewer lane in the registry — publish a lane you have built to the Reviewer Lane Registry so other people can find and install it
- Take over a capability or EoS integration — assume maintainership of an existing third-party capability, reviewer lane, or EoS host integration through a handoff, an adoption fork, first-party absorption, or a de-listing
- Add or update a host's integration — set a host's documentation-sourced
runtime.hostIntegrationaxes (ADR-1239 Phase A), with theundocumentedsentinel rule - Migrate an install test to the executed plan — convert an
fs.existsSync-probing install test group to a value assertion againstinstallRuntimeArtifacts's executed-plan return, and test against a fake fs adapter - Vendor a dependency — add a third-party package
gsd-core/bin/**needs at runtime as a verbatim vendored artifact, keep it out ofdependencies, and pick the right upstream bundle - Turn a capability off (and keep it off) — disable a capability via the surface, or gate individual hooks off without removing the capability
- Drive GSD from a tracker issue — start a phase from a GitHub, Linear, or Jira issue
- Migrate from GSD 2 — upgrade an existing GSD 2 project to GSD Core
- Update GSD — re-run the installer to pick up the latest release
- Clean up get-shit-done-cc — remove leftover old-package artifacts that cause a spurious
⬆ /gsd-updateindicator after migrating to@opengsd/gsd-core - Fix the worktree base-mismatch (exit 42) error — resolve the branch-divergence condition that halts parallel phase execution
- Recover and troubleshoot — fix common problems, rebuild context, and uninstall
Reference
- Commands — every command with flags and examples
- Configuration — full config schema, model profiles, git branching strategies
- CLI tools —
gsd-tools.cjsprogrammatic API for workflows and agents - JSON error mode —
gsd-toolsfailure channels: faults (stderr, exit 1) vs degraded results (stdout, exit 0), and the reason-code taxonomy - Features — complete feature index
- Inventory — installed skills and surface map
- STATE.md schema — field-by-field reference for
.planning/STATE.md - CONTEXT.md schema — field-by-field reference for
.planning/phases/<N>/CONTEXT.md - PLAN.md schema — field-by-field reference for
.planning/phases/<N>/PLAN.md - Planning artifacts — all
.planning/files and their roles - Review and verification capabilities — code review, security, and Nyquist capability ownership and hook contracts
- Gate predicates — canonical specification of the phase-gate predicate vocabulary
- Capability matrix — generated catalogue of every capability's role, tier, extension points, hook kinds, and
engines.gsd - Exit code reference — generated catalogue of every registered process exit code, its name, meaning, and owning module, plus the reserved bands and the v1/v2 exit contract
- Capability manifest — the full
capability.jsonschema and validation rules gsd capabilitycommand — install / update / remove / list reference for third-party capabilities- Workflow fragments — in-file
<!-- gsd:section -->marker grammar for fragmentizing workflow markdown at emission time - Reviewer Lane Registry — generated catalogue of third-party reviewer lanes, with their flags, transport, and install commands
Explanation
- Context engineering — how context rot forms and how GSD Core prevents it
- The phase loop — design rationale for the Discuss → Plan → Execute → Verify → Ship cycle
- Multi-agent orchestration — how subagents are spawned, scoped, and coordinated
- Security model — trust boundaries, permissions, and safe automation
- The capability trust model — why third-party capabilities are gated by consent + integrity + reversibility, not a sandbox
- How overlay capabilities compose — why first-party always wins and how the loader resolves precedence, conflicts, and fail-open load-failure warnings
- Architecture — system architecture, agent model, and data flow
- The Embeddable Orchestration System — one public, versioned contract for embedding GSD across many hosts
- Discuss modes — assumptions mode vs interview mode for
/gsd-discuss-phase - Context monitoring — context window monitoring hook architecture
- Issue-driven orchestration — recipe for driving GSD from a tracker issue using existing primitives
Related
- What's new in 1.7.0 — curated highlights of the 1.7.0 release
- Root README — landing page, quickstart, and documentation overview
- Changelog — release history