bbdf7e8e84
* chore(#4654): add local/no-unconfined-path-join and drain it to zero Phase 4 of epic #4636 — the ratchet, and the phase that makes the epic hold. THE MEASUREMENT THAT RESHAPED THE PHASE. An AST census (the repo's own parser, not grep) found what the epic never enumerated: ADR-4650 named seven containment implementations; `src/` alone held roughly 24 more hand-rolled gates across ~13 files, several guarding a write or an `fs.rmSync`. Two verified by reading rather than pattern-matching — `research-store.cts` comments its own as "ensure the resolved file path stays inside the store dir" immediately before a write, and `capability-lifecycle.cts` gates `fs.rmSync` with one. So the epic's Done-when "one containment predicate, used at every site" was FALSE when Phase 3 reported it satisfied. It is true now: the rule is clean across src/, scripts/, gsd-core/bin/ and hooks/ with an EMPTY allowlist. WHY NOT THE RULE THE ISSUE PROPOSED. #4654 proposed flagging `path.join` whose first argument is a managed root and whose later arguments derive from argv. That is a taint analysis over 2046 call sites, in ESLint, without type information; "derives from argv" is not locally decidable. Any approximation either floods or is trivially evaded, and a rule that fires on hundreds of correct sites earns an allowlist of hundreds — the opposite of a ratchet. What is actually duplicated is the COMPARISON, not the join, and that has one recognizable shape. Arm 1 X.startsWith(Y + sep) the hand-rolled containment idiom Arm 2 a containment predicate called as a bare statement, answer discarded Arm 2 is the issue's "asserts the result was narrowed, not merely that a helper was called". Its example `validatePath(x, root).resolved` is already structurally impossible — Phase 3 un-exported `validatePath` — so the remaining expressible failure is ignoring the answer, which is the defect that recurred five times in this epic. The census found exactly one live instance (`milestone.cts:1643`); it now returns the proven `ContainedPath` so consumers stop re-deriving the path the comment above it was extracted to stop them re-deriving. The rule deliberately does NOT try to catch validate-one-path-use-another where the answer is used but a different variable flows onward. That needs flow analysis; the branded `ContainedPath` from Phase 3 is the defense there, and the two are complementary. PER-SITE FAMILY CHOICE, NOT A DEFAULT. Phase 3's lesson binds: collapsing a lexical site onto the realpath family broke four tests and was caught only by the matrix. Every migrated site was triaged individually. The six installer-migrations tree-walks and the six capability-lifecycle gates take the LEXICAL family because their operands are already realpath-resolved and they deliberately treat the final component as a link; boundary sites take realpath. TWO SITES WITH AN INVERTED CONTRACT, which a mechanical swap would have broken. `installer-migrations.cts:127` and `runtime-artifact-install-plan.cts:144` REJECT `target === root` by contract, while the canonical comparison ACCEPTS it. Swapped naively, a migration could `rmdir` the user's config root and a third-party descriptor could write at configHome itself. Both keep `=== root` as an explicit additional arm alongside the predicate call — the predicate decides containment, the call site keeps its own extra condition (ADR-4650 decision 6). ONE DUPLICATE DELETED OUTRIGHT: `planning-inspect.cts`'s `isWithinRoot` was byte-identical to `isContainedIn` and said so in its own docstring. `isContainedIn` is now exported for callers that have already resolved both operands and need only the comparison, with a doc note that a caller which has NOT resolved them must use a full predicate instead. THE MARKER, AND WHY IT IS NOT THE ALLOWLIST. Nine sites are justified holdouts and carry `// allow-handrolled-containment: <reason>` with a mandatory, reviewable reason. Two justifications: (a) not a containment decision — an ancestor-walk loop condition, sub-repo grouping, worktree identity matching, declared-path coverage; (b) it IS containment but the canonical predicate is unreachable — `capability-validator.cjs` is a committed pre-build `.cjs` and the compiled `security.cjs` is untracked build output, so requiring it would break a fresh clone. `scripts/lib/drift-scan.cjs` runs under `lint:ci` with the same exposure. The marker was renamed from `allow-lexical-prefix-match` mid-phase because that name asserted only (a) and would have stated something false at the (b) sites. A marker suppresses BEFORE the violation counter increments, so a file whose every occurrence is marked still reports `staleAllowlistEntry` — otherwise a drained entry lingers and silently re-permits the site later. DEMONSTRATED RED, per #4654: a hand-rolled copy reintroduced into a real `src/` file made `npm run lint` fail with the rule's full guidance message; removing it returned the tree to clean. Both halves recorded — red alone proves nothing, since a rule red for an unrelated reason looks identical. DISCLOSED: `defaultRequireFromInstallRoot` (gsd-tools.cjs) previously carried two distinct rejection messages and two manual realpath calls; routing it through `tryWithinRoot` collapses them to one message, and a missing module now surfaces as MODULE_NOT_FOUND rather than ENOENT. No test asserts either message. The security property is preserved and slightly strengthened — the candidate is realpathed and containment re-checked, and the dangling-symlink oracle closure comes along with it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(#4654): record the containment ratchet in CONTEXT.md and the security model Both entries previously described the seam without the thing that keeps it a seam. They now state what the rule bans, and — more usefully for whoever reads this next — what it deliberately does NOT attempt: deciding per path.join call whether an argument came from user input. That question is not locally decidable, and an approximation across ~2000 join sites would earn an exemption list of hundreds, which is the opposite of a ratchet. Also records the marker's two legitimate justifications and that its reason is mandatory, so the escape stays reviewable rather than becoming a mute button. Glossary gate 270 refs exit 0; install-tree goldens and CONTEXT-INDEX.json regenerated and confirmed byte-identical rather than assumed — which also confirms eslint-rules/ is not a shipped path. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(#4654): close review findings and the two matrix failures MATRIX FAILURE 1 — a collapsed message broke a negative-proof test, and my evidence for collapsing it was wrong. I searched tests/ for the literal string "resolves outside its install root", found nothing, and reported that no test asserted it. The test matches a REGEX SUBSTRING, /outside its install root/, so the literal search missed it. What broke was "NEGATIVE PROOF: a symlinked module pointing OUTSIDE the install root is not loaded" — the test guarding the exact property I claimed was preserved. defaultRequireFromInstallRoot now does both checks again with both messages byte-identical, each routed through the canonical predicate, which is better than the original since that hand-rolled both comparisons. MATRIX FAILURE 2 — shipped migrations are checksum-locked, and a marker cannot serve there. migrationChecksum hashes plan.toString(), which INCLUDES comments, so a suppression marker inside a plan body drifts the baseline exactly as an edit does. Measured: with markers in place, two of the four still differed from their committed checksums. The four shipped bodies are now byte-identical to next, and the rule's config excludes those four paths BY NAME rather than by a directory wildcard, so a NEW migration is still covered. Six containment comparisons stay un-ratcheted there; that gap is recorded in the rule's Known gaps, in CONTEXT.md and in the security model rather than left implicit. Justification (c) is removed from the marker's documented reasons, because a marker was proven unable to express it. ADVERSARIAL REVIEW — the sharpest finding was that the rule banned the CORRECT shape while permitting the incorrect one: startsWith(root) with no separator is the genuinely unsafe form, since it accepts a sibling such as root-evil, and my own test blessed it as valid. Flagging every bare startsWith would swamp the rule, so that stays a STATED gap rather than a silent one. Closed for real: the template-literal spelling, which the census never saw because it only inspected plus-concatenation — that surfaced TWELVE more sites, now triaged and migrated. A separator reached through a const alias is now resolved via scope analysis. And isContainedIn, exported in Phase 3, was missing from the discarded-result set, so a bare no-op call went unflagged on the one function the epic funnels through. SECURITY REVIEW — the marker could over-suppress two ways: a block comment worked identically to a line comment, and one marker silently covered every violation sharing its line. It now requires a Line comment positioned after the flagged node ends, so it anchors to the node it trails. Four sites had dropped an unreachable-but-deliberate equality rejection against the root; each is restored as the call site's own arm. eslint.config.mjs still documented the OLD marker token, which my rename missed — it would have sent the next author in circles. A FALSE GREEN, recorded because it nearly stuck: lint:ci reported exit 0 from a stale eslint cache while twelve real violations existed. Every lint check here now clears the cache first. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(#4654): anchor a suppression marker to the violation it actually trails The matrix caught this; my own test caught it, on its first execution. The case "two violations on one line: trailing marker suppresses only the one it trails" expected 1 error and got 0 — both were suppressed. ROOT CAUSE: the anchoring accepted any Line comment on the node's line whose range started at or after the node's end. A trailing marker at the END of a line sits after EVERY node on that line, so that condition held for all of them. "After the node" does not identify WHICH node the marker trails. The fix reads as correct and is not. FIX: deferred reporting. Violations accumulate during traversal instead of being reported immediately; at Program:exit each marker claims exactly ONE pending violation — the one on its line whose end is nearest before the marker begins — and every unclaimed violation is then counted and reported. One marker, one suppression. An earlier violation sharing the line is still reported, which is the property the security review asked for and the previous attempt only appeared to deliver. The counter now increments at flush time rather than during traversal, so a suppressed occurrence still does not keep an allowlist entry alive. AND A TOOL THAT SHOULD HAVE EXISTED BEFORE THE FIRST MATRIX RUN. `node --test` is hard-blocked here, so this rule's test file could only ever be executed on the remote matrix — which is why a broken anchoring shipped into a run. ESLint's programmatic Linter API is not a test runner, and exercising the rule through it verifies every case locally in seconds. All 24 now pass locally, including the two-on-one-line case that failed remotely. That loop should have been built before the rule was first sent to the matrix rather than after it failed twice. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * chore(#4654): backfill PR 4674 into the changeset and complete 70-docs.json The phase gate requires enablementSequence and the Diataxis quadrants; 70-docs now carries both, with the how-to quadrant skipped for a stated reason rather than an empty field. The audience for this deliverable is a contributor who trips the rule, and the task-oriented guidance reaches them in the ESLint message itself — which names the correct predicate, says how to choose between the realpath and lexical families, cites the Phase 3 regression caused by choosing wrong, and gives the marker syntax. A docs/how-to page would be a second, driftable copy read by nobody at the moment of failure. enablementSequence is recorded as what it actually is: a VERIFICATION sequence, not an enablement one. The rule is never off, so there is no off-to-on transition to describe. scripts/lint-docs-required.cjs now passes (ok_docs_updated) — it could not evaluate against the mandated pr:0 placeholder. 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" - Read CI timeout budget signals — find the near-cap warning on a run, read the accumulated
tests/ci-timeout-budget-history.jsonltrend, and know which lever (cap, shard balance, shard-1 contents) a repeatedly-near-cap lane calls for - 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 - Enable concurrent per-plan planners in chunked mode — dispatch chunked
/gsd-plan-phase's per-plan Tasks together within one outline Wave instead of one at a time, and know when the setting has no effect - 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 - Batch quick tasks — run several
/gsd-quick-shaped tasks together with/gsd-quick-batch, understand capacity/isolation, and recover a failed or interrupted batch - 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 - Partition rules for compact-content splits — the protected-content list, sentinel syntax, and the five CI checks a
workflow.compact_contentspine/detail split must obey - 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