* test(#3885): failing-first coverage for the depth bound and the manufactured wave verdict ADR-3473 §8.5 says a swallowed failure may not become an authoritative-looking answer. Three families do exactly that today; this commit pins each one RED. Measured on this tree, 2026-08-27: intel query, .planning/intel/file-roles.json nested 12000 deep -> exit 1, "Error: Maximum call stack size exceeded" searchJsonEntries / matchesInValue carry no depth parameter at all. The MAX_JSON_SEARCH_DEPTH = 48 bound existed in the retired SDK lineage (sdk/src/query/intel.ts at 11918dcc3^) and the surviving .cts lineage never received it. same fixture nested 48 and 49 deep -> both return total=1 at exit 0, truncated=undefined Nothing distinguishes "searched to the bottom" from "stopped looking". query phase-plan-index, a plan whose depends_on names an unresolvable token -> warnings: ["Plan 03-02: declared wave: 2 but depends_on DAG places it in wave 1"] The token is never mentioned. computeDependencyLevels drops the edge with `if (!resolvedDep) continue;`, every plan becomes a root, and the tool then reports the author's correct wave: as the thing that is wrong. countPhasePlansAndSummaries with fs.readdirSync throwing EACCES -> hasContext:false, indistinguishable from a phase that simply has no CONTEXT.md. context_read_error is undefined. The shapes these tests assert against, chosen here so the implementation has a target rather than inventing one later: `truncated: boolean` on the intel query result, `unresolved: Array<{plan, token}>` from computeDependencyLevels, and `context_read_error: string | null` per analyzed phase. Deliberately green, and they must stay that way — each stops the fix from over-firing: depth 48 is found and NOT flagged truncated (the ceiling is inclusive) a shallow miss reports no truncation (noise control, N1) 10,000 siblings at depth 2 are unaffected (the bound is DEPTH, N2) a genuine wave: mismatch on a fully-resolved DAG still warns (N3) a genuinely missing directory is absent, not an error the emitted depends_on display mapping still passes an unresolved token through verbatim — already pinned by the existing #3785 test, so no duplicate was added T31 asserts at the consumer's output per ADR-3180 Decision 4(b): it runs the real CLI and reads the emitted JSON, because a unit assertion on computeDependencyLevels would have passed throughout #3427's life. Design: .gsd/phase/feat-3885-no-silent-swallow/40-design.md Test matrix: .gsd/phase/feat-3885-no-silent-swallow/50-test-matrix.md Refs #3885 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * enhance(#3885): no silent swallow, and no verdict manufactured from dropped data Implements ADR-3473 §8.5. A failure or a gap in the input stops being absorbed into an output that reads as authoritative. The recursion bound, restored but NOT verbatim (src/intel.cts) MAX_JSON_SEARCH_DEPTH = 48 is threaded through searchJsonEntries and matchesInValue, which carried no depth parameter at all. The bound existed in the retired SDK lineage (sdk/src/query/intel.ts at 11918dcc3^) and the surviving .cts lineage never received it — §8.3's "a consolidation may not delete an invariant along with the surface that held it", demonstrated. Measured before: a .planning/intel file nested 12000 deep exits 1 with "Error: Maximum call stack size exceeded". Reachable from a project document. The original returned a bare `false` at the ceiling. Restoring that verbatim would trade a crash for a silent "no match" when the truth is "I stopped looking" — the same class this epic exists to close, and ADR-3473 Decision 4 forbids it. So the bound carries a truncation signal: nesting 47 -> found, truncated false nesting 48 -> found, truncated false (the ceiling is inclusive) nesting 49 -> not found, truncated TRUE nesting 12000 -> exit 0, truncated TRUE, no RangeError A shallow document that simply has no match reports truncated FALSE — the flag means "I stopped early", never "I found nothing", or it would be noise. The bound is on DEPTH: 10,000 siblings at depth 2 are unaffected. The dropped edge is named, and stops being blamed on the author (src/phase.cts) computeDependencyLevels dropped every unresolvable depends_on token with a bare `continue`. Each drop makes a plan a root, so the whole phase collapses to wave 1 — and cmdPhasePlanIndex then reported the author's CORRECT wave: as the thing that was wrong. Before: warnings: ["Plan 03-02: declared wave: 2 but depends_on DAG places it in wave 1"] After: warnings: ["Plan 03-02: depends_on token \"nonexistent-token-3427\" does not resolve to any plan in this phase — edge dropped, wave placement for this plan may be unreliable"] The suppression is PER PLAN, never blanket: a plan with a fully-resolved DAG and a genuinely wrong wave: still gets the mismatch warning. resolveDependencyId stays two-tier — the shortFormToId third tier is §8.3/Phase 6's rule and is deliberately not built here. The emitted depends_on display mapping still passes an unresolved token through verbatim (#3785). No artifact from failed inputs (gsd-core/workflows/review.md, #3352) A failed lane leaves no result file, so "every lane failed" is exactly "the aggregate JSONL has zero lines" — the gate condition already existed as a byproduct. REVIEWS.md is no longer written in that case, and the commit step is skipped with it. A budget-SKIPPED lane also leaves no file and is NOT counted as a failure. Per-lane output and non-empty .err are preserved to .review-diagnostics/ before `rm -rf "{run_dir}"` destroys the only record that the lanes failed at all; the commit step names one file, never a glob, so the diagnostics are not swept in. Unreadable is not absent (roadmap.cts, gap-checker.cts, init.cts x2) Four callers collapsed an EACCES on a phase directory into [] and reported hasContext:false — byte-identical to a phase that simply has no CONTEXT.md. Each now names the directory it could not read. A genuinely missing directory stays absent rather than becoming an error, which is what keeps the fix from over-firing. Fatal errno folded into a retry set: audited, no defect found Reported as a verified negative rather than padded with a change. withPlanningLock was fixed by #1884/PR #3472; acquireStateLock by #3776; atomicRenameWithRetry and estimate-cli's renameWithRetry are correct by construction — bounded set {EPERM,EBUSY,EACCES}, bounded attempts, and they return or rethrow the final error rather than swallowing it. estimate-cli's sole caller surfaces that rethrow as write_error in its JSON output. Manufacturing a diff to make the checkbox look worked-on is the Goodhart outcome Decision 6 exists to prevent. Disclosed: R46 (the commit step names one file, never a glob) is a real regression guard but is NOT independently failing-first — the commit fence is byte-identical pre- and post-fix, so it only fails pre-fix through its shared extraction dependency. Recorded rather than claimed as fail-first. Design: .gsd/phase/feat-3885-no-silent-swallow/40-design.md Test matrix: .gsd/phase/feat-3885-no-silent-swallow/50-test-matrix.md Refs #3885 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(#3885): escape untrusted tokens, and stop cleanup destroying unpreserved evidence Two review findings, both real, both in my own change. An isolated adversarial review found the evidence-preservation block never checked mkdir/cp exit status while `rm -rf "{run_dir}"` ran unconditionally in a SEPARATE fenced block. A disk-full or unwritable phase directory therefore still destroyed the only copy of the failed lanes' output — reintroducing the exact #3352 data loss this item exists to stop, inside the fix for it. Preservation and cleanup are now one block, because each fenced block is a separate execution and a shell variable cannot carry between them. mkdir -p and each cp are exit-checked; cleanup runs only when preservation succeeded, and a failure warns naming the intact run directory. "Nothing to preserve" is not a failure and still cleans up. Driven three ways: success removes run_dir, failure leaves it intact with the warning, nothing-to-preserve removes it. The failure is induced by a file-vs-directory conflict rather than chmod 0o000, which root bypasses. The new unresolved-depends_on warning embedded a user-authored token verbatim: warnings: ["Plan 03-02: depends_on token \"evil Plan 03-01: FORGED WARNING\" does not resolve ..."] The JSON wire form is safe, and the security reviewer judged it non-exploitable for that reason. It is escaped anyway through formatDiagnosticToken — the helper #3884 added one phase earlier for exactly this class. warnings[] is an array a consumer naturally prints line by line, and not reusing the sibling fix is the generative-fix-divergence shape this epic exists to close. The same treatment is applied to context_read_error / phase_dir_read_error, which embed a phase directory path a repository can choose, and to the fs error message, which echoes the raw path itself. Known limit L5 recorded: the bound is on DEPTH only. A 300,000-element shallow array yields a 14.5MB reply with truncated:false. Correct per §8.5 and per negative space N2, disclosed rather than left to be discovered. Refs #3885 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(#3885): unreadable is not absent in intel.cts either, and a corrupt snapshot is not "no snapshot" Blocker from the round-2 isolated review, and it is my own inconsistency: this phase applied "unreadable is not absent" to phase directories and left it broken in the file it was already editing. chmod 000 .planning/intel/file-roles.json gsd-tools intel query <term> -> {"matches":[],"total":0,"truncated":false} exit 0 safeReadJson swallowed every read failure and returned null, so an EACCES was byte-indistinguishable from an absent file AND from a genuine no-match. Now it separates three states: ENOENT stays silently absent, because not every project has every intel file and intelQuery loops over all of them expecting misses; EACCES/EIO and malformed JSON are both surfaced naming the file. A corrupt intel file previously read as "no matches" too — same defect, same fix. Threading that outcome through the other three callers found something worse than the reported case. intelDiff returned no_baseline:true for a corrupt or unreadable snapshot — not a silent failure but an actively FALSE verdict, telling the caller they never took a snapshot when they did. That is §8.5's headline case, so it is fixed and tested rather than noted. intelStatus and intelApiSurface collapsed the same way; intelApiSurface additionally printed a "not yet populated" banner that was simply untrue. Every row is failing-first, including the absent-file ones — the field is new, so it does not exist pre-fix at all. Those rows are not pre-fix pins; they pin that the fix does not OVER-fire on the ordinary absent case, which is what would turn this into noise on every project lacking an intel file. IO failure is injected by monkeypatching fs and restoring in finally, never chmod 0o000 — root bypasses mode bits, so the reviewer's manual chmod repro is not reproducible as a test. Refs #3885 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * test(#3885): build the pathological intel fixture as text, not by stringifying a nested object The remote runner came back red on Linux with two failures, both T4: deeplyNestedIntelDoesNotOverflowTheStack, while the same test passed on macOS. The product was never at fault. writeNestedFixture(12000) built a 12,000-deep JavaScript OBJECT and then JSON.stringify'd it. JSON.stringify recurses once per level, so it overflowed the TEST PROCESS's stack — the error was thrown before the CLI was ever spawned. Linux's container stack is smaller than macOS's, which is the whole of the platform difference. Measured, with the same document built as JSON TEXT so nothing in the building process recurses: depth=100 rc=0 truncated=true depth=5000 rc=0 truncated=true depth=12000 rc=0 truncated=true depth=60000 rc=0 truncated=true V8 parses this shape iteratively; only stringify recurses. The bound works at every depth tried. The fixture is now built by string concatenation. That is also the more faithful input — a real deeply nested JSON document on disk is exactly what the bound guards, where a stringified object was only ever a way to produce one. The depth stays 12000. Lowering it would have made the test pass by weakening it to accommodate a fixture bug, and 12000 is a legitimate pathological input the product handles. T4 remains a genuine fail-first: rebuilt against the parent of the commit that added the bound, the string-built depth-12000 fixture still drives the CLI to rc=1 with "Error: Maximum call stack size exceeded". A comment records why the fixture is text, so it is not "simplified" back into a macOS-green / Linux-red test. Refs #3885 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * chore(#3885): backfill the changeset PR number Refs #3885 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * test(#3885): normalize path separators before splicing into the workflow's bash CI red on one lane — test (windows-latest, 24, shard 3/3). macOS, Linux and the remote runner were all green. AssertionError: commit must name the single REVIEWS.md file; got: --files C:UsersRUNNER~1AppDataLocalTempgsd-3352-phasedir-mOKmuy/03-REVIEWS.md Every backslash in C:\Users\RUNNER~1\AppData\Local\Temp\... was eaten. The harness spliced an OS-native temp path into the extracted bash, and bash consumes \U, \A, \L and \T as escapes on an unquoted expansion. The same loss broke RUN_DIR, so "rm -rf" targeted a path that never existed and the run directory survived — which is the other two assertions. This is a fixture defect, not a product one, and that was checked rather than assumed. In production the phase directory is toPosixPath-normalized at every call site that serializes it (bin/lib/init.cjs:951, 1381, 1461, 1529, 1595), and the run directory is created by "mktemp -d" running inside the bash block itself (gsd-core/workflows/review.md:163), which emits POSIX-style output even under Git-Bash on Windows. Neither ever carries a backslash where the workflow reads it. The file's pre-existing #3034 harness splices raw native paths too, but only ever inside double-quoted assignments, so it never tripped this — my new harness followed that convention faithfully into the one place where it does not hold. Both now splice through toPosixPath from shell-command-projection, the established seam, which is a no-op on POSIX and mirrors what production does. No assertion was weakened. "commit must name the single REVIEWS.md file" and "the run dir must still be destroyed" still assert exactly that; only how the fixture supplies its path changed. Nothing is skipped on Windows — a t.skip() here would have hidden the question of whether the exposure was real, which is the question that mattered. Driven both ways: a synthetic C:\Users\RUNNER~1\... input reproduces the exact CI string when unfixed and yields C:/Users/RUNNER~1/... when fixed; a POSIX input produces a byte-identical shape, proving the normalization is idempotent. Refs #3885 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * test(#3885): stop the harness making the deleted run dir its own cwd Windows shard 3/3 stayed red after the separator fix, on two assertions the separator fix never touched: AssertionError: the run dir must still be destroyed AssertionError: nothing to preserve is not a failure — run dir must still be removed The separators were a real bug and fixing them fixed the --files assertion. They were not this bug, and two CI cycles went into the wrong axis before I stopped converting path forms and looked at what the harness actually does. runWriteReviewsFlow passed cwd: runDir to runHook, so the child bash process's working directory WAS the directory the block under test then removes with rm -rf "$RUN_DIR". POSIX allows a process to delete its own cwd — verified locally, cd "$d"; rm -rf "$d" removes it cleanly — and Windows does not: a live process's working directory cannot be removed. So on Windows the directory survived and both assertions failed, on macOS and Linux it vanished and they passed. Nothing to do with slashes. Harness-only. Production never cd's into the run directory; every reference is by absolute path, and RUN_DIR is created by mktemp -d inside the bash block itself (gsd-core/workflows/review.md:165) rather than injected. review.md is unchanged. Fix: the child now runs with its cwd in an unrelated temp directory that the block under test never deletes. Neither assertion was weakened, and nothing is skipped on Windows — the tests in this file carry no platform guard and run there unconditionally, which is how this surfaced at all. Honest limit: the Windows failure mode cannot be reproduced on macOS, because POSIX permits the very thing Windows refuses. The diagnosis is grounded in that documented divergence and in the fact that only the Windows lane failed, but the green outcome on windows-latest is unverified until CI runs it. Refs #3885 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
- 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"
- 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
- 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
- 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 - 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