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* 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 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
- Resolve prohibition findings — turn the spec phase's surfaced must-NOT constraints into resolved, dismissed, or deferred spec decisions
- Resolve an ESLint glob-coverage finding — bring a source file that matches no lint rule under coverage, or record a reasoned exemption
- Plan a phase — run research, decompose work, and verify plan quality
- Execute a phase — run plans in parallel waves with fresh-context subagents
- 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
- 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
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
- 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 - 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