* feat(#3841): assert gsd-tools identity before any state-mutating verb only this package publishes. The path-based branches — a project-local install, a runtime config directory — had no such guarantee; they trusted their configured location. This closes them. Mechanism: once resolution finishes, and before any verb runs, the preamble probes the tool it picked with `runtime-identity --raw` and matches the answer with a shell `case` pattern ANCHORED to the start of the compact payload (`{"packageName":"@opengsd/gsd-core"`). An unanchored substring match accepts the decoy `{"packageName":"get-shit-done-cc","note":"@opengsd/gsd-core"}`, which any colliding package could publish. The outcome is exported as the two-valued `GSD_IDENTITY_STATUS` (`ok`/`unverified`), so the gate is asserted on a VALUE rather than on warning prose. Rollout is warn-then-fail per the #3146 ruling: `unverified` prints one line naming BOTH causes and continues, because `no_identity_verb` cannot tell a foreign package from an `@opengsd/gsd-core` older than the verb, and at rollout the old-version case is the common one. The blocker was byte budget, not design. The preamble is inlined into 112 shipped files and several sat within single-digit bytes of frozen ceilings (`gsd-verifier.md` 16 bytes, `gsd-executor.md` 33, `execute-phase.md` 234); a first attempt broke five of them. What made room was collapsing the resolver's twenty near-identical `elif [ -f … ]` arms into one candidate-list helper (`_gsd_at`), which buys far more than the assertion costs. The preamble is now 2,624 bytes against 4,500 — a net 1,876 bytes SMALLER per inlined file, so every capped file moved away from its ceiling rather than toward it. No cap raised, no size-budget exception added, no override token emitted. Resolution order, every runtime-home probe, the `unset -f gsd_run` re-source fix, the fail-closed `exit 1`, and the `CLAUDE_ENV_FILE` persistence are all preserved byte-for-byte in substring terms; the snippet still begins with `_GSD_SHIM_NAME=` and still ends with `fi`, which the parity extractors anchor on. `gsd-core/references/gsd-run-resolver.md` is re-synced byte-equal. Also fixes two stale claims found in passing: CONTEXT.md and FEATURES.md both described an `[ -x ]` guard as the load-bearing re-source defense. That guard was tried and REMOVED in #3831 — it rejected the bare function name, fell through every branch, and hit `exit 1`, which kills a sourced caller's shell. `unset -f gsd_run` is the actual mechanism. Refs #3841 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(#3841): pair the anchor's brace by requiring a closed identity payload The matrix went red on `tests/new-project-mvp-prompt.test.cjs` — "new-project.md has unbalanced braces: net depth 2" — plus a knock-on report from its parent `bug #1516` describe, which is the same failure counted once at the child and once at the block. Root cause: that guard (:182-189, mirroring #3784 bd53925f) walks characters and increments on `{`, decrements on `}`, with no awareness of shell quoting. It scans `new-project.md` PLUS every `new-project/steps/*.md`, and both `new-project.md` and `steps/auto-mode-config.md` carry one inlined preamble copy — hence net 2 from a snippet that was off by exactly one. The unpaired brace was the `{` inside the single-quoted `case` pattern of the identity anchor, which is correct shell and invisible to a text scanner. Fix in the snippet, not the guard. The pattern now anchors at BOTH ends: `'{"packageName":"@opengsd/gsd-core"'*'}'`. That balances 51/51 with a brace that does real work rather than a cosmetic pair — a truncated payload whose prefix matches now fails too, where before it verified. Safe for any future additive field: a JSON object's own closing brace is always the last character, whatever type the last value has, which is pinned by two negative-space tests (a nested object and an array-valued last key must both still verify). Cost: +3 bytes, against the 1,873 the resolver fold already gave back. The alternative considered and rejected was dropping the literal `{` for a `?` glob. It balances too, but weakens the anchor from "must be an opening brace" to "must be any one character", and the anchor is the entire point. Two guards added so this cannot recur silently: - runtime-launcher-parity (F0) pins brace balance at the SNIPPET, so the next edit to that pattern fails on the file it broke instead of surfacing three files downstream in a test whose name mentions neither the launcher nor this issue. It also asserts depth never goes negative, since a `}` preceding its `{` nets to zero while being unbalanced at every prefix. - runtime-identity gains behavioral truncated-payload and trailing-garbage fixtures, so the added `}` is proven load-bearing rather than merely present. Verified: snippet 51/51 braces; new-project combined net depth 0; the seven other preamble-bearing files with nonzero depth are unchanged from merged next (their own prose, not the preamble, and not in any guard's scan set); all 112 inlined copies and the resolver reference re-synced byte-equal; sync:launcher idempotent on the second run. Refs #3841 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * chore(#3841): backfill changeset PR number 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
- 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"
- 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
- 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" - 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 - 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
- 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
- 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 - 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