Tom Boucher b54c1c5848 fix(#4709): retire the Gemini CLI reviewer lane (#4716)
* fix(#4709): retire the Gemini CLI reviewer lane

Google stopped serving Gemini CLI for the free/Pro/Ultra tiers on 2026-06-18 —
the same sunset that removed the gemini RUNTIME in #1928 (shipped 1.8.0). GSD
targets solo developers, so those tiers ARE the user path: the lane spawned
`gemini {{model}} -p -`, a binary that no longer answers for the majority of
users, and five locales documented it as a supported choice.

The lane was re-created after #1928 by the reviewer-lane-as-manifest-data work
(6a9babda69, #2798/#2837, ADR-2782). Per the maintainer that re-creation was an
error in that buildout rather than a considered decision, so this corrects a
mistake and needs no ADR-2782 amendment.

Reviewer roster: 12 lanes / 13 flags -> 11 lanes / 12 flags.

TWO sources of truth had to be removed, not one. Deleting
capabilities/gemini/capability.json left the capability registry at 11 lanes
while src/review-lane-descriptor.cts's hand-maintained REVIEWER_LANES array
still carried its own complete gemini entry at 12 — precisely the disagreement
checkReviewerLaneParity exists to catch. Both are gone; both parity checkers
now run clean against the real tree (lane parity ok/0 violations, docs parity
0 violations).

Surfaces stripped of the dead flag:
- capabilities/gemini/ deleted; registry and capability-matrix regenerated
- src/review-lane-descriptor.cts: REVIEWER_LANES entry, docblock count, and the
  three doc comments that used --gemini as a live example
- commands/gsd/{review,plan-review-convergence,autonomous,progress}.md and the
  four matching skills/*/SKILL.md: argument-hint frontmatter and flag bullets
- gsd-core/workflows/help/modes/{full,full.compact}.md: /gsd-help signatures,
  the detected-CLI list, and the reviewer-title list
- gsd-core/workflows/settings-integrations.md: the integrations wizard no longer
  offers "Gemini" as a model option, and the settable-keys list drops it
- gsd-core/workflows/review.md: the `command -v gemini` probe, the --gemini
  flag, the roster frontmatter, the install pointer to the sunset repo, and the
  jq-less / precedence / self-skip lane lists
- gsd-core/workflows/sync-skills.md: "two runtimes (grok, gemini) resolve to
  ANOTHER runtime's skills root" is now one runtime; gemini never aliased
  anything, it fell through canonicalizeRuntimeName to a fail-closed default
- docs/{CONFIGURATION,COMMANDS,CLI-TOOLS}.md, docs/reference/capability-matrix.md,
  docs/how-to/set-up-cross-ai-review.md — including its `npm install -g
  @google/gemini-cli` instruction and the two rows recommending --gemini
- docs/features/{cross-ai-peer-review,opt-in-parallel-reviewer-lanes}.md as the
  generator inputs behind docs/FEATURES.md, plus the three locale FEATURES.md
  signature lines the docs-parity gate covers (the #2781 class: a flag change
  that never reaches the mirrors)

Counts reconciled against measurement rather than arithmetic: 8 timeout keys of
11 lanes, 11 budget keys, 9 model keys, and four hardcoded literals in
tests/reviewer-lane-declarations.test.cjs (NEW_LANE_ONLY_IDS 5->4, LITERAL_ROSTER
12->11, two roster counts 12->11).

BEHAVIOR CHANGE, accepted deliberately: `gsd config-set review.models.gemini`
now errors with "Unknown config key". An existing key already in
.planning/config.json still parses and is simply never read, so no project fails
to load. This is the repo's own documented policy for exactly this case
(docs/CONFIGURATION.md:327 — "a key left over from a removed reviewer validated
silently and was never read. Such a key is now rejected by config-set"), so no
installer migration ships. Note my first measurement of this was WRONG: I tested
config-get, which reads undeclared keys fine, and generalised. Read and write are
different surfaces and gave different answers.

Antigravity is untouched throughout — its --antigravity/--agy flags,
review.models.agy, ~/.gemini/antigravity configHome, ~/.gemini/config global
skills root (#3738), hookEvents "gemini", GEMINI.md instruction file, and every
gemini-* model id it actually runs on.

Refs #4709

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* chore(#4709): changeset for the reviewer-lane retirement

Type Removed: the --gemini flag and its three config keys are user-visible
surface that no longer exists.

Refs #4709

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(#4709): close the 24 test failures and the locale-doc gap the gates found

An adversarial review and a full matrix run between them found substantially
more fallout than inspection had. All of it is this PR's own, and all of it is
fixed rather than waved off.

THE MATRIX RUN FOUND 24 FAILURES ACROSS 6 FILES. Inspection had predicted two.
The dominant class was a test helper that looks up a lane by slug and throws
`no declared lane 'gemini'`:

- tests/feat-2483-review-claude-mds-guard.test.cjs (6) — used gemini as the
  "other declared first-party lane" to contrast against claude's env
  suppression. Now qwen, verified from source as a lane that declares no `env`
  (only claude does), so the contrast still holds.
- tests/review-lane-descriptor.test.cjs (6) — the duplicate-flag and
  duplicate-section fixtures deliberately COLLIDED with a real declared lane to
  prove the parity checker reports a duplicate. `--gemini`/`Gemini` no longer
  collide with anything, so the checker reported
  `descriptor_lane_not_in_registry:acme` instead and the tests proved nothing.
  Now collide with `--codex`/`Codex`, reproduced against the real checker.
- tests/review-reviewer-selection.test.cjs (3) — these distinguish KNOWN-but-
  undetected from UNKNOWN. gemini flipped categories, inverting what they
  proved. The known case now uses qwen; `__nope__` stays the unknown fixture.
- tests/review-default-reviewers-resolution.test.cjs (2), and
  tests/settings-integrations.test.cjs (3) — the wizard now offers three
  reviewer CLIs, not four, so the test and its name say three.
- Two count assertions the earlier sweep missed outright:
  reviewer-lane-declarations.test.cjs:359 (`length, 12`) and
  reviewer-docs-parity.test.cjs:681 (`>= 12`).

THE LOCALE-DOC GAP, and why the parity gate stayed green over it. All four
locale mirrors still documented `--gemini` as a live reviewer flag. The
docs-parity checker asserts the PRESENCE of every current flag and never the
ABSENCE of a retired one, so "0 violations" was never evidence those files were
clean — my earlier reading of it as such was wrong. This is the #2781
locale-drift class in the opposite direction. Fixed across 12 locale files:
COMMANDS.md flag lists and table rows, CONFIGURATION.md `review.models.gemini`
rows and reviewer prose, CLI-TOOLS.md config examples, and
set-up-cross-ai-review.md including its install block and its
which-reviewer-to-choose row, which now recommends Antigravity.

ALSO FOUND, and instructive about my own method: docs/CONFIGURATION.md:297 still
carried a `review.models.gemini` row. My sweep had missed it because my grep
excluded lines matching `gemini-[0-9]` to spare Google's model ids — and that
row's example value is `"gemini-2.5-pro"` on the same line. The exclusion built
to avoid false positives created a false negative.

Remaining comment/example sites: src/review-reviewer-selection.cts:309 and
src/config.cts:598 named the dead flag and key as examples;
gsd-core/references/planning-config.md:269 likewise; and
review-reviewer-selection.cts:22 claimed in the PRESENT tense that gemini is a
lane-only reviewer capability. Line 38 of that same docblock says "Before this
phase the five non-runtime reviewers (gemini, ...)" and is left exactly as is —
that is past-tense history, and rewriting it would falsify the record.

Deliberately still deferred to Phase 4, because it is the RUNTIME axis rather
than the reviewer lane: the locale install-on-your-runtime.md `--gemini --global`
instructions, the USER-GUIDE colon-form notes, and the ARCHITECTURE
runtime-detection flag lists.

Both parity checkers green against the real tree; lint:ci exit 0.

Refs #4709

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* chore(#4709): backfill the changeset PR number

pr: 0 -> 4716, now that the PR exists. Never guessed ahead of the number.

Refs #4709

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

---------

Co-authored-by: sim <sim@local>
Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 03:03:44 -04:00

GSD Core

Git. Ship. Done.

English · Português · 简体中文 · 日本語 · 한국어

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.

npm version npm downloads Tests Discord GitHub stars License


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:

  1. Discuss — capture implementation decisions before anything is planned
  2. Plan — research, decompose, and verify the plan fits a fresh context window
  3. Execute — run plans in parallel waves; each executor starts with a clean 200k-token context
  4. Verify — walk through what was built; diagnose and fix before declaring done
  5. 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

Star History Chart

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.


Claude Code is powerful. GSD Core makes it reliable.

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