e2f4c16d9e
* docs(#3469): amend ADR-3408 section 8.3 — the pipeline has sanctioned exceptions Section 8.3 read 'Every STATE.md write applies the pipeline.' That is false by design for two commands, and acting on it would have inverted a shipped feature. Preservation makes curated frontmatter win over a re-derived body value. state sync exists to do the opposite — #905's 'body annotation beats existing frontmatter when both are present'; it re-derives frontmatter FROM the body. REGENERATE_STATE is a factory reset that rebuilds STATE.md from scratch. Applying the pipeline to either would re-lock exactly what the command was invoked to replace. This issue's own scope line, inherited from the epic, said to route the direct writeStateMd callers through the pipeline. For cmdStateSync that would have shipped silently, with every gate green, because no test asserts that sync LETS the body win. Caught by reading the helper's docstring and then verifying the claim against the code — a stale comment had already misdirected this epic once. Both commands are now named in a closed exception list and are permanent ratchet entries. Consequence recorded rather than left to bite Phase 4: the 'drive the ratchet to 0 and delete the file' target in this ADR and in #3471 is wrong. Two entries are permanent, so the correct end state is 2, and the honest report is '0 removable bypasses, 2 sanctioned'. A guard reaching 0 here would only do so by having stopped looking at two real writers. * refactor(#3469): one composition for the write seam, not one per caller Implements ADR-3408 section 8.3 as amended. syncAndPreserveStateMd is now the single composition of syncStateFrontmatter and applyPostSyncPreservation. readModifyWriteStateMd and cmdPhaseComplete both CALL it instead of each assembling the two steps themselves. cmdPhaseComplete keeps its own writePlanningFileSet envelope — the composition returns content, it does not take over the write, so STATE.md still commits atomically with ROADMAP and REQUIREMENTS. Assembling the stages at a call site is a re-derivation even when every step calls an owner. Upstream's fix(#3374) routed cmdPhaseComplete through applyPostSyncPreservation but left it calling syncStateFrontmatter directly first, so the composition was duplicated and free to diverge with both guards green. That is ADR-3180 Amendment 2's finding repeating on the write side. cmdMilestoneComplete gains preservation. It wrote through writeStateMd, so it got sync and no preservation — the identical shape #3374 reported for phase.complete, and flagged upstream as a follow-up in the helper's own docstring. This is that follow-up. Divergence is now visible: preservation_warnings names each field restored over a disagreeing derived value. Deliberately NOT named warnings — cmdPhaseComplete already exposes warnings as a prose string array, and two sibling commands carrying that name with different element types is Generative Fix Divergence, the class this epic exists to remove. patchCore stops running stateReplaceField over the whole document. One observable consequence, intended per design row 9: a frontmatter-shaped patch key with no body counterpart now reports failed instead of silently succeeding, because the old whole-document match was literally hitting the YAML line case-insensitively. The guard closes Phase 1's DECLARED KNOWN GAP as promised rather than re-deferring it: section 8.3(b) detection is tractable now the composition exists. Scoped by two factors to avoid Phase 1's measured 29-to-1 false positive rate — a variable field-name argument AND a content argument whose nearest preceding assignment is not stripFrontmatter. Verified 0 findings and 0 false positives across all 33 call sites, plus 5 synthetic shapes. It also detects the re-assembly shape above. Ratchet: 4 entries to 2, both sanctioned-permanent. cmdStateSync's owner changes from #3471 to sanctioned-permanent per Amendment 2 — routing it through preservation would invert the #905 contract. Also fixed inline rather than deferred: cmdMilestoneComplete's STATE.md read now happens inside withStateLock. It previously read outside any lock before writeStateMd took its own, leaving a TOCTOU window under concurrent writers. * test(#3469): characterization coverage for the single write seam Matrix sections A-E. Criterion 6 was amended by maintainer decision — all five instances closed by point fixes while Phase 1 was in flight — so these are characterization tests at the consumer's output per ADR-3180 Decision 4(b)/(c), paired with the drift guard's count, never either alone. Section C is the one that earns its keep. cmdStateSync is a sanctioned permanent exception: state sync exists to re-derive frontmatter FROM the body, so preservation there re-locks exactly what the command was invoked to replace. C1 pins that the body wins; C4 pins that this phase left the command byte-identical. Nothing else in the suite would notice if a future change made sync start preserving, and the natural reading of 'one write seam' is to make precisely that change. Section E pins the guard's false-positive scoping. E4 (updateCore's strip-then-replace) and E5 (sectionBody-scoped calls) must NOT be reported — the naive detector measured 29 false positives to 1 true positive in Phase 1. E7 is the inverse: a sanctioned-permanent entry disappearing must FAIL, because a guard reaching zero here would only do so by having stopped looking at two real writers. Also corrects a stale test that asserted patchCore's old whole-document behavior, which this phase deliberately changes. One honest limitation, flagged rather than papered over: A1's 'byte-identical to pre-refactor' cannot be diffed against real pre-refactor bytes from inside the suite. It is implemented as the seeded fast-check property that cmdPhaseComplete's composed output equals readModifyWriteStateMd's for the same inputs — the strongest available proxy, not the literal claim. * docs(#3469): refresh the seam glossary entry and add the changeset Two spec-review gaps, both real. CONTEXT.md's STATE.md Transition Module entry named three direct writeStateMd callers including cmdMilestoneComplete. This phase routed that one through the composition, so the line was false the moment the refactor landed. Worth recording plainly: I wrote that sentence in Phase 0, correcting an older stale pointer in it, and my own Phase 2 change invalidated it again within the same epic. That is the exact drift this epic exists to remove, demonstrated on the epic's own documentation — and it is why the entry now ends by saying the whole-repo drift guard, not this line, is the authoritative count. The entry now records the composition (syncAndPreserveStateMd) and states that exactly two direct callers remain, both SANCTIONED PERMANENT rather than debt. Changeset: type Changed, because milestone complete's observable output moves. Tier-2 per ADR-3180 Decision 3 — a stale body line no longer wins over fresher frontmatter, and the command gains preservation_warnings. Docs requirement is met by the ADR amendment already in this diff. * test(#3469): register property-test temp-dir cleanup at creation time Standards review, minor but real: the new fast-check property cleaned up its temp dirs in a loop AFTER fc.assert returned. A genuine property failure throws, so that line never ran and every dir from the failing run — including all of fast-check's shrinking iterations — leaked. The failure path is exactly when a littered machine hurts most, and a failing property test is the case the test exists for. Cleanup is now registered with t.after() at dir-creation time, so teardown happens however the test exits. Not try/finally — CONTRIBUTING.md:356 bans it inside test bodies, which is why the after-the-assertion shape existed in the first place. Swept the rest of the branch's test diff for the same shape; phase.test.cjs already uses registered teardown and nothing else matched. * fix(#3469): patchCore routes frontmatter writes instead of dropping them Checkpoint returned 10 failures of 33880. One implementation defect, three test defects, one stale test — all fixed, and the implementation defect is the one that matters. patchCore stripped frontmatter and then reconstructed it VERBATIM, applying no patches to it. An arbitrary custom frontmatter key with no body counterpart and no FIELD_CLASSIFICATION row — risk_level in the upstream fix(#3351) test — therefore always reported failed and silently never wrote. It worked before, via the old whole-document match on the raw YAML line. That is a regression against this phase's own design row 9, which requires frontmatter changes to ROUTE THROUGH the seam — still work, policy-governed — not to stop working. Removing a capability is not routing it. An upstream test caught it, which is the argument for running the checkpoint before believing the refactor. patchCore now partitions by frontmatter shape, decided structurally from the parsed frontmatter's own keys rather than a naming heuristic: - classified keys still report failed — policy owns them and a raw patch may not bypass it; - unclassified keys apply to the frontmatter object and report updated — Phase 1's behavior-table row 19, a field with no row is not this contract's business; - body-shaped keys are unchanged. The property 'failure' was my own test breaking the repo's Clock Seams rule. The two paths agree byte-for-byte; the only difference was last_updated, stamped from the wall clock on two invocations milliseconds apart, so it could never pass. Time is now frozen with mock.timers across both — not by excluding last_updated from the comparison, which would have silently stopped comparing a field the composition writes. B4's fixture could not discriminate: normalizeStateStatus maps any text containing 'complete' to 'completed', and milestone complete's own new body value derives to exactly that — which was also the fixture's stale value. The stale value is now 'executing' so the assertion can tell 'body correctly won' from 'stale survived'. B5's fixture tripped a pre-existing unstarted-phase guard before reaching any write-seam code; it now has the matching phase directory. D9 asserted the old exempt set. readModifyWriteStateMd now calls one symbol rather than assembling two, so it needs no exemption; syncAndPreserveStateMd is the sole legitimate composition site. * fix(#3469): patchCore resolves body-first, so the body wins a name collision Re-verification returned 2 failures of 33880, both D4 — the hostile row for a key that exists as BOTH a frontmatter key and a body field. The partition checked frontmatter first, so 'status' — classified in FIELD_CLASSIFICATION and also present as a body 'Status:' line — routed to the frontmatter branch, was rejected as classified, and reported failed. Wrong order. Patching 'status' means the body field, and upstream fix(#3351) says so in its own comment: 'the legitimate working case for state.patch is display-cased BODY fields — Status, Current Plan, Phase.' The body is authoritative in this model; frontmatter is the projection. D4 asserted exactly that and was right. Resolution order is now body, then frontmatter: 1. resolves to a body field -> apply to body, updated 2. else an own key of the frontmatter: classified -> failed (policy owns it) unclassified -> apply to frontmatter, updated 3. else -> failed Verified by probe against the compiled lib for all four cases rather than asserted: risk_level (frontmatter-only, unclassified) still lands; current_phase still fails; display-cased Status unchanged; D4's lower-cased status now lands via the body with the frontmatter untouched. The current_phase case was the one that could have regressed silently, so its fixture was read rather than assumed — D1's body carries 'Phase: 3 (alpha)' and no 'Current Phase:' line, so body-first cannot reach it. * chore(#3469): backfill pr number in changeset fragment --------- Co-authored-by: sim <sim@local>
GSD Core
Git. Ship. Done.
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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.
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:
- Discuss — capture implementation decisions before anything is planned
- Plan — research, decompose, and verify the plan fits a fresh context window
- Execute — run plans in parallel waves; each executor starts with a clean 200k-token context
- Verify — walk through what was built; diagnose and fix before declaring done
- 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
License
MIT License. See LICENSE for details.
Claude Code is powerful. GSD Core makes it reliable.