* docs(#4906): ADR-4910 amendment — a write refuses on a document with any unreadable node §5 scoped the parse error to the node. That is correct for reads and was never examined for writes. §5 was reasoned entirely from #4899, a read bug. Node-scoping is right there: a ragged Progress table must not make phase list and init.progress fail, because those are the commands a user needs to see what to repair. But the rule was stated unqualified, and it licensed something never considered — phase.complete mutating a ROADMAP.md whose Progress table it could not read. A partial-view write persists a wrong answer rather than merely returning one. Amendment: reads stay node-scoped; a write refuses when ANY node in the document carries a parse error, whether or not the mutation targets it. A reader answers a bounded question from a bounded region; a writer asserts that the document it emits is the document it read, and cannot make that assertion about a region it could not parse. §3's byte-stability does not rescue it — splicing untouched bytes faithfully is not the same as knowing they were consistent with the change. Rejected: refusing only when the mutation's own target node is unreadable. It is the appealing middle and it does not hold — phase.complete writes **Plans:** while deriving that value from plan/summary counts in a different region. The regions a write depends on are not statically the regions it touches. Downstream: Phase 1 ships both scopes plus a hasUnreadableNodes predicate the serializer consults; Phase 2 gains a new acceptance criterion (a refused write leaves the file byte-identical on disk); Phase 4's census gains a second axis and must publish both counts. Appended as a dated section per docs/contributor-standards.md pattern 1 — the original Decision body is unchanged. Refs #4906 Refs #4910 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(#4906): correct the amendment's motivating example and state the limit it exposes An isolated review pass falsified the first draft's central example. The correction is recorded in the amendment rather than quietly patched, because it bounds what the rule can promise. - The draft claimed phase.complete derives the value it writes into **Plans:** from a different REGION of the same document. It does not. planCount and summaryCount come from findPhaseInternal at src/phase.cts:3429-3434 — a filesystem scan of the phase directory. No PlanningDoc node holds them. That widens the dependency rather than narrowing it, and it makes an explicit limit necessary: a document-scoped write refusal protects the document's own consistency and says nothing about the correctness of a value sourced from outside the document. Recorded as a stated limit and named out of scope for this epic. - The rejected alternative (refuse only when the mutation's own target node is unreadable) is re-grounded on two arguments that survive: it would almost never fire, since a verb locates the node in order to write it; and it guards something smaller than the operation performs, because serialization re-emits the whole file. - §5's body names `phase list` as a consumer an unreadable Progress table would block. It is not one — cmdPhasesList (src/phase.cts:207) enumerates phases/ and never opens ROADMAP.md. init.progress and roadmap.analyze are the real instances; the argument never needed three. §5's body left unmodified per the append-only rule, correction carried in the amendment, fold in at ratification. - Clarified that the new WriteOutcome refusal sits on a different axis from §5's reserved document-level Result<PlanningDoc> parse failure, so no reader can conclude that reservation was reopened. A document can be valid to open and still refuse to be written. Refs #4906 Refs #4910 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"
- Enable UI interaction capture — let
/gsd-ui-review's auditor capture hover, focus, open-menu and filled-form states through thechrome-devtoolsCLI from Bash, with no MCP server - 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