Garry TanandClaude Fable 5.1
c241216637
* fix(freeze): hook reads the same state root /freeze writes — fails closed under GSTACK_HOME (#1459, #1509) check-freeze.sh resolved its state dir as ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA:-$HOME/.gstack} while every writer (/freeze, /guard, /unfreeze, /investigate) resolves through bin/gstack-paths, GSTACK_HOME first. With GSTACK_HOME set, /freeze wrote freeze-dir.txt under GSTACK_HOME, the hook read $HOME/.gstack, found no file, and allowed everything — a deny-tier boundary failing open. One resolver now: gstack_hook_state_root() in careful/bin/hook-extract.sh (already sourced by both check-freeze.sh and check-careful.sh) implements the exact gstack-paths chain, including the CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT guard that keeps a CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA leaked from another plugin from redirecting our state. check-freeze.sh and gstack_hook_log_fire both call it; nothing spawns gstack-paths from a hook. Tests: the GSTACK_HOME deny regression, GSTACK_HOME-over-CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA precedence, plugin-root guard both ways, and a byte-parity check against bin/gstack-paths across six env combinations. Existing freeze tests now pass CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT like a real plugin install would. Idea from PR #1509 (@NikhileshNanduri); implemented natively against the shared resolver rather than a second fallback chain. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(relink): never delete or link over a skill gstack does not own (#2119) gstack-relink runs on every ./setup. Its cleanup did `rm -rf` on any same-name entry whose SKILL.md was a symlink, with no readlink check, and its link step did `mkdir -p` then `ln -snf` onto any existing SKILL.md — on Linux that replaces a user's real file with a symlink into gstack (macOS refused by accident). setup's Windows mode-flip cleanup deleted any real dir whose name matched a gstack skill. A personal `qa` skill, or a fork installed under another path, was destroyed by the installer of a tool it never asked for. Ownership is now proven, never assumed. An entry is ours when it is a symlink resolving into INSTALL_DIR or RENDER_DIR, a real dir whose SKILL.md is such a symlink, or a real dir carrying the .gstack-owned marker setup now writes for Windows copy installs (legacy copies count when byte-identical to the source or carrying gen-skill-docs' AUTO-GENERATED header). Anything else — including an entry whose readlink fails — is foreign: left untouched, reported on stderr, and listed in relink's summary line. The same rule replaces setup's Windows name-match deletion; setup:1040 and gstack-uninstall:204 already gated on readlink, so this closes the last unguarded deleter of the class. Tests: foreign real dir in flat mode, foreign flat entry on a prefix flip, foreign directory symlink, RENDER_DIR-targeted entry (ours), marker-carrying copy (ours), marker-less copy (foreign); the Windows cleanup test now proves provenance three ways and keeps the user's own same-name skill. Idea and two regression cases from PR #2119 (@smblight); implemented on the destination entry, not only the symlink target. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(setup): Chromium bootstrap is best-effort and bounded — skills always register (#1900, #1901, #1902, #913, #2233) setup runs under `set -e`, and the Chromium bootstrap in section 2 sat ahead of skill registration in section 4 with a bare `bunx playwright install chromium`, an unbounded download, and an explicit `exit 1` after the post-install launch probe. On an offline, proxied, or AppArmor-restricted box the user ended with ZERO skills registered and a re-run that died at the same line; a wedged download hung setup indefinitely. Every browser failure now records a reason code in _PW_FAIL_REASON and setup continues: skipped (GSTACK_SKIP_PLAYWRIGHT=1, #913), chromium-install, chromium-install-timeout (the download is bounded by the existing _wait_with_deadline helper, default 600s, env GSTACK_PLAYWRIGHT_INSTALL_TIMEOUT, process tree killed via _kill_tree), chromium-install-locked (another setup holds the lock: this one registers skills and re-probes next time instead of exiting), windows-no-node, windows-node-modules, post-install-launch (with the GSTACK_CHROMIUM_NO_SANDBOX=1 hint for Ubuntu 24.04's userns policy, #2157). The daemon font refresh is skipped when Chromium is unavailable. The final summary names the skills that need the browser (/qa, /qa-only, /design-review, /browse, make-pdf, /pair-agent) and the fix for the recorded reason, and logs the reason code (never a path) through gstack-telemetry-log when telemetry is on. Tests: static invariants over the anchor-sliced block (no exit, every reason code, deadline helper, trap chaining, guarded refresh, summary contents) plus an integration harness that executes the real block with a stubbed probe and installer: install failure, hang killed at the deadline with the tree kill recorded, non-numeric knob fallback, live lock (continues, installer not run, lock preserved), stale lock reclaimed, post-install probe failure, and the skip flag. Credit @DavidMiserak (PR #1900) for the best-effort shape; re-implemented on the current block. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(designs): preserve the time-attack fork-port residual evaluation The read-only evaluation of what remains portable from time-attack/gstack (583 raw candidates, 415 canonical, 287 with a residual, 48 adversarially refuted, 14 standing) lived only on a throwaway VM. This records the report, the lite residual index, the absorbed/superseded ledger, the refuter verdicts, and SHAS.md with the fork tip, upstream HEAD, merge-base, and a sha256 per file, so every scheduled fix in this wave series traces to its evidence. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs: file the fork-port residual deferrals and document the Chromium bootstrap knobs TODOS.md gains the seven items the CEO and eng reviews of the fork-port residual plan deliberately deferred (shared ownership helper, config-key reader tripwire, "pre-existing" vocabulary, opt-in reply_language, .auth.json writer removal, the fork-derived-change rule for CONTRIBUTING, hook slug parity audit), each with rationale, and updates the two residual bullets for PR #2232 and PR #2233 with their dispositions. README's Troubleshooting section explains the best-effort Chromium bootstrap and its three knobs. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(relink): canonicalize link targets before the ownership check Pre-landing review finding: the ownership gate compared readlink output textually against INSTALL_DIR and RENDER_DIR, so two shapes of gstack's OWN entries read as foreign and were left behind on a mode flip — a legacy relative link (`gstack/qa/SKILL.md`, resolved against $PWD instead of the link's directory) and an entry linked against the real path of a symlinked install dir (~/.claude/skills/gstack -> checkout). Both now resolve: relative targets anchor at the link's directory, the directory part is canonicalized with pwd -P (the basename stays verbatim so a dangling managed target is not misread), and both spellings of each root are accepted. Two regression tests. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(telemetry): one-shot setup events never sweep other sessions' pending markers gstack-telemetry-log finalizes every .pending-<session> marker that is not the caller's own as outcome:unknown and deletes it. setup's onboarding events (_setup_welcome, _setup_playwright) have no session of their own, so a Chromium bootstrap failure during a live skill session recorded a false unknown for that session and removed its marker. New --no-sweep flag skips the stale-marker pass; both setup call sites use it (the synthetic --session-id did not prevent the sweep). Surfaced by the Codex adversarial pass. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(hooks): partial upgrades fail closed for freeze and fall back for careful A hook script and its sourced helper can be copied at different times. With an older careful/bin/hook-extract.sh that lacks gstack_hook_state_root: - check-freeze.sh now emits a deny ("fail closed, re-run ./setup or /unfreeze") instead of dying under set -e with no decision JSON. - check-careful.sh falls back to ${GSTACK_HOME:-$HOME/.gstack} so project rules under the plain chain still load and a decision is always emitted (a warn hook must never break on a stale helper). gstack_hook_state_root prints its root without a trailing newline and both callers capture it with a printf-x sentinel, so a GSTACK_HOME ending in a newline round-trips byte-for-byte with the writer's %q form. gstack_hook_log_fire stays on ${GSTACK_HOME:-$HOME/.gstack}/analytics, the same two-step chain every other analytics writer and reader uses, so the usage log remains one file under a plugin install. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(setup): never link over, copy over, or reap a skill gstack does not own (#2119) The relink gate alone left three destructive sites open: - link_claude_skill_dirs runs BEFORE relink on every ./setup and used `ln -snf` (Linux replaces a user's real SKILL.md with a symlink into gstack) or, on Windows, rm -rf + cp followed by a marker that made the user's directory "ours" on the next flip. It and _install_alias_skill_md now consult _claude_entry_is_ours first and skip loudly. - cleanup_prefixed_claude_symlinks kept a bare name-match deletion and a `*gstack*` substring match. Symlink arms use anchored `gstack/` segment patterns; the Windows real-file arm proves provenance (marker, byte-identity with our source, or the full two-line gen-skill-docs banner within the first 40 lines, never a one-line substring another generator could emit). cleanup_old_claude_symlinks uses the same banner rule. - gstack-relink's fast path judged absolute targets before canonicalizing, so `/x/gstack/../foreign/SKILL.md` counted as ours; dot-segment targets now canonicalize first. Its banner rule matches setup's. The `.gstack-owned` marker records the owning payload's realpath. Entries skipped by setup or relink are listed in the final setup summary. Chromium bootstrap refinements from the pre-landing review: an INT/TERM trap kills the installer's process tree; the Windows npm chain no longer masks an install failure; GSTACK_SKIP_PLAYWRIGHT=1 is reported as a choice rather than a failure and sends no telemetry; the timeout knob is normalized (0, 000, non-numeric, or more than nine digits fall back to the 600s default instead of killing on the first poll or never killing). Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs: README Chromium note outside the CLAUDE.md fence; report banner stripped; deferrals name the four gate sites - README: the Chromium troubleshooting paragraph sat inside the CLAUDE.md snippet code fence, so copy-paste put it into users' CLAUDE.md. Moved to the troubleshooting list. - docs/designs/fork-port-residual-2026-09/REPORT.md: the scratch-run preamble banner is gone; SHAS.md re-hashed. - TODOS: the ownership-gate deferral names the four sites and the marker-path idea for the fork-with-banner residual. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(todos): the bootstrap block coverage gap is pinned except the quarantine helper Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(setup,relink): ownership proof has two strengths; weak proof never deletes a directory or discards a differing file The first #2119 gate treated a byte-identical or banner-bearing real-file SKILL.md as full ownership, so a prefix flip could rm -rf a user's directory (their own qa skill started from a gstack SKILL.md, plus my-templates/) and the link pass could replace their customized file with a symlink. Two strengths now: - STRONG: the .gstack-owned marker (we created the directory), or a directory holding nothing but symlinks and the marker (deleting it loses no data). Only strong proof removes a directory whole. - WEAK: byte-identity with our source or the two-line gen-skill-docs banner on a real file. Weak proof covers that SKILL.md and our runtime-asset links only; a differing file is moved to ${GSTACK_HOME:-~/.gstack}/backups/skills/<ts>/<skill>/ before we link over it, and setup/relink print one summary line naming what moved. The marker is written on every platform now (path-independent proof for Windows copies and for checkouts whose path carries no gstack segment), but only for a directory gstack creates: a directory we merely link into (unclaimed, or a legacy install) never becomes deletable whole. A directory with no SKILL.md at all is unclaimed: the link pass may add our file, the cleanup pass has nothing to remove. Also from the review passes: the banner check reads 8192 bytes, not 40 lines (investigate, office-hours, plan-ceo-review and design-consultation carry the banner past line 40 and were left "foreign" on pre-marker Windows installs); a link into a checkout named without a gstack segment (git worktree add ../gstack-<branch>) is ours when that tree carries setup + VERSION + bin/; relink's fast path is gone so both files canonicalize before judging; relink's root alias (_gstack-command) is gated and stamped like every other entry; relink reports the bare entry name with setup's wording and setup dedupes when forwarding (_run_relink_quiet); the summary names the browser skills as examples. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(setup): Chromium-install lock reclaim is atomic and pid-validated; abandoned locks expire; the tree kill walks /proc without pgrep - A pid file holding "", "-1" or "0" counted as a live holder (kill -0 -1 signals every process and succeeds), locking Chromium out for good. A pid must be a positive integer; anything else is stale. - Two setups judging the same lock stale raced on rm -rf + mkdir and the loser deleted the winner's fresh lock. The stale dir is renamed first (atomic), so exactly one reclaims. - A lock dir with no pid file (killed between mkdir and echo) was never reclaimed; it now expires once older than the install bound. - _kill_tree needed pgrep; debian-slim and git-bash ship none, so the bound killed only the wrapper subshell and the installer kept running. Without pgrep the children are found by walking /proc/*/stat. - The timeout knob is normalized in one place with one comment; the trap's exit 130 is the only exit the block may contain. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(freeze): an unexpected non-zero death denies via an EXIT backstop instead of exiting with no decision set -e plus a failing pipeline (a tool on PATH exiting non-zero, a deleted cwd) ended the deny-tier hook with no JSON, which Claude Code treats as non-blocking: the edit outside the boundary proceeded. The EXIT trap now prints a deny for any non-zero exit that happens before a decision was written; every deliberate output sets _FREEZE_DECIDED first so a late failure never prints a second object. Tests also pin careful's state-root precedence (GSTACK_HOME over CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA, plugin data when CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT names gstack) and the specific "out of date" deny for a helper without gstack_hook_state_root. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * refactor(telemetry): guard the stale-marker sweep with an if, not a break inside the loop Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(todos): the ownership gate lives in six sites, and the cleanup arms inline their own chain Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * test: the two remaining linker harnesses extract the ownership helpers; the marker is the one allowed dotfile setup-claude-skill-assets and user-render-out-dir-install slice link_claude_skill_dirs out of setup without the helpers it now calls, so the extracted function died with "command not found" (or, inside an if, degraded into "foreign, skipped"). Both harnesses now carry the full helper set and the globals. The hidden-files census allows .gstack-owned, which the linker writes for directories it creates rather than copying from the skill source. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(setup,relink): weak proof never costs the user a file — assets, flips, failed backups, foreign dir links, alias markers Third review cycle on the ownership model, every item reproduced against a fixture before the fix: - Runtime assets (sections/, templates/, checklist.md, ...) were refreshed with rm -rf regardless of who owned the directory, so an unclaimed or weakly-owned directory lost the user's same-named real files. Real assets are now replaced only in a directory gstack created or strongly owns (marker, or SKILL.md symlink into gstack), plus the legacy Windows real-copy shape; elsewhere they are kept and reported. Symlinks are never content and are always refreshed. - The prefix-flip cleanup deleted a customized banner-bearing SKILL.md that the link pass would have backed up. Both cleanups now compare the file against the source (raw, or with its name: line rewritten to the entry name, which is how alias and prefixed copies legitimately differ) and move a differing file to the backup root. - A failed backup (unwritable root) returned success and the caller linked over the file anyway. It now fails, and the entry is left untouched and reported. - A foreign DIRECTORY symlink whose target had no SKILL.md fell through to the "unclaimed directory" rule and was replaced by a real directory. A symlink that does not resolve into gstack is foreign, full stop. - The alias installers stamped .gstack-owned into pre-existing directories; they now follow the same created-or-already-marked rule. - A directory counts as "only links" only when every link resolves into gstack: a user's own symlink makes it mixed, so their link survives. - The gstack-tree heuristic requires bin/gstack-relink, not just a VERSION file, a setup script and a bin/ directory. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(setup): lock reclaim hands a fresh lock back; a live holder past the bound is stale; /proc walk strips through the last paren - Reclaim renamed the lock by path after judging it stale, so a second setup that had already reclaimed and re-created it lost its fresh lock and two installers ran. After the rename the moved directory's pid is re-read: a new live holder, or a fresh lock whose pid is not written yet, is moved straight back. - A pid file whose process is alive but whose lock is older than the install bound is stale too (the holder is past its own deadline, or the pid was recycled to an unrelated long-lived process); it was locked forever. - The /proc fallback stripped the comm field to the FIRST ") ", so a comm containing ") " hid a child from the kill. proc(5) says the last paren. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(freeze): mark the decision written after the helper prints, not before If gstack_hook_decision ever failed between the flag and its output the backstop would have stayed silent; setting the flag after the print keeps the deny backstop armed until a decision is actually on stdout. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * chore: bump version and changelog (v1.80.0.0) Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs: update project documentation for v1.80.0.0 README troubleshooting + manual uninstall cover the skill ownership gate (.gstack-owned marker, ~/.gstack/backups/skills/<ts>/, foreign same-name skills left untouched). CLAUDE.md and CONTRIBUTING carry the ownership and best-effort Chromium bootstrap invariants for people editing setup and gstack-relink. PROJECT_STRUCTURE gains careful/, freeze/, guard/, unfreeze/, gstack-upgrade/, gstack-relink, and the setup/relink/hook test files. TESTING_INTERNALS documents the anchor-sliced setup harness convention. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * fix(setup): the final summary reports customized SKILL.md files moved to the backup root The linker moved a weakly-proven, customized SKILL.md aside before linking over it but never said so; only relink printed a "Moved N" line, and by the time relink runs the file is already a symlink. The summary now names each moved file and where it went, next to the foreign-entry report. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * test: run assembled setup harness scripts from a temp file, not `bash -c` argv (Windows MSYS2 8 KB truncation) windows-free-tests (run 33907177851) failed in test/setup-alias-name-uniqueness.test.ts with bash: -c: line 178: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `' The harness slices functions out of `setup` and passed the joined script as one `bash -c` argv element. The ownership gate grew that script from 6.7 KB to 15.7 KB, and on Windows bash is an MSYS2 program: when its parent is a non-MSYS process (bun), msys-2.0.dll's build_argv() runs any argument containing `?*["'(){}` through globify()/glob(), which copies the pattern into a fixed `Char patbuf[8192]` and silently stops after 8192 - MB_CUR_MAX (8186 chars under C.UTF-8); GLOB_NOCHECK then returns the truncated text as the argument. Character 8186 lands inside the single-quoted sed token on line 178. Rebuilding the exact script with CI path shapes and cutting it at 8186-8190 characters reproduces the identical message locally; cmd.exe's 8191-UTF-16 cap and CreateProcess's 32767 do not fit the evidence. Fix: test/helpers/bash-script.ts writes the script to a temp file and runs `bash <path>` — a short glob-free argument that never enters globify. Every setup harness that assembled a script for `bash -c` (11 files, 22 sites) uses it; timeouts and env are preserved verbatim, spawn/timeout errors are appended to stderr, temp cleanup is best-effort. `spawnSync('bash', [<Windows absolute path>])` already passes on windows-latest in setup-help, uninstall-windows-copies and the migration tests. The Windows-curated list is byte-identical before and after. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs(test-free-shards): the rerun-refresh harness spawns bash <tempfile> via test/helpers/bash-script.ts, not bash -c Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com> --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
gstack
"I don't think I've typed like a line of code probably since December, basically, which is an extremely large change." — Andrej Karpathy, No Priors podcast, March 2026
When I heard Karpathy say this, I wanted to find out how. How does one person ship like a team of twenty? Peter Steinberger built OpenClaw — 247K GitHub stars — essentially solo with AI agents. The revolution is here. A single builder with the right tooling can move faster than a traditional team.
I'm Garry Tan, President & CEO of Y Combinator. I've worked with thousands of startups — Coinbase, Instacart, Rippling — when they were one or two people in a garage. Before YC, I was one of the first eng/PM/designers at Palantir, cofounded Posterous (sold to Twitter), and built Bookface, YC's internal social network.
gstack is my answer. I've been building products for twenty years, and right now I'm shipping more products than I ever have. In the last 60 days: 3 production services, 40+ shipped features, part-time, while running YC full-time. On logical code change — not raw LOC, which AI inflates — my 2026 run rate is ~810× my 2013 pace (11,417 vs 14 logical lines/day). Year-to-date (through April 18), 2026 has already produced 240× the entire 2013 year. Measured across 40 public + private garrytan/* repos including Bookface, after excluding one demo repo. AI wrote most of it. The point isn't who typed it, it's what shipped.
The LOC critics aren't wrong that raw line counts inflate with AI. They are wrong that normalized-for-inflation, I'm less productive. I'm more productive, by a lot. Full methodology, caveats, and reproduction script: On the LOC Controversy.
2026 — 1,237 contributions and counting:
2013 — when I built Bookface at YC (772 contributions):
Same person. Different era. The difference is the tooling.
gstack is how I do it. It turns Claude Code into a virtual engineering team — a CEO who rethinks the product, an eng manager who locks architecture, a designer who catches AI slop, a reviewer who finds production bugs, a QA lead who opens a real browser, a security officer who runs OWASP + STRIDE audits, and a release engineer who ships the PR. Twenty-three specialists and eight power tools, all slash commands, all Markdown, all free, MIT license.
This is my open source software factory. I use it every day. I'm sharing it because these tools should be available to everyone.
Fork it. Improve it. Make it yours. And if you want to hate on free open source software — you're welcome to, but I'd rather you just try it first.
Who this is for:
- Founders and CEOs — especially technical ones who still want to ship
- First-time Claude Code users — structured roles instead of a blank prompt
- Tech leads and staff engineers — rigorous review, QA, and release automation on every PR
Quick start
- Install gstack (30 seconds — see below)
- Run
/office-hours— describe what you're building - Run
/plan-ceo-reviewon any feature idea - Run
/reviewon any branch with changes - Run
/qaon your staging URL - Stop there. You'll know if this is for you.
Install — 30 seconds
Requirements: Claude Code, Git, Bun v1.0+, Node.js (Windows only)
Step 1: Install on your machine
Open Claude Code and paste this. Claude does the rest.
Install gstack: run
git clone --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gstack.git ~/.claude/skills/gstack && cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setupthen add a "gstack" section to CLAUDE.md that says to use the /browse skill from gstack for all web browsing, never use mcp__claude-in-chrome__* tools, and lists the available skills: /office-hours, /plan-ceo-review, /plan-eng-review, /plan-design-review, /design-consultation, /design-shotgun, /design-html, /review, /ship, /land-and-deploy, /canary, /benchmark, /browse, /connect-chrome, /qa, /qa-only, /design-review, /setup-browser-cookies, /setup-deploy, /setup-gbrain, /retro, /investigate, /document-release, /document-generate, /codex, /cso, /autoplan, /plan-devex-review, /devex-review, /careful, /freeze, /guard, /unfreeze, /gstack-upgrade, /learn. Then ask the user if they also want to add gstack to the current project so teammates get it.
Step 2: Team mode — auto-update for shared repos (recommended)
From inside your repo, paste this. Switches you to team mode, bootstraps the repo so teammates get gstack automatically, and commits the change:
(cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setup --team) && ~/.claude/skills/gstack/bin/gstack-team-init required && git add .claude/ CLAUDE.md && git commit -m "require gstack for AI-assisted work"
No vendored files in your repo, no version drift, no manual upgrades. Every Claude Code session starts with a fast auto-update check (throttled to once/hour, network-failure-safe, completely silent).
Swap required for optional if you'd rather nudge teammates than block them.
OpenClaw
OpenClaw spawns Claude Code sessions via ACP, so every gstack skill just works when Claude Code has gstack installed. Paste this to your OpenClaw agent:
Install gstack: run
git clone --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gstack.git ~/.claude/skills/gstack && cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setupto install gstack for Claude Code. Then add a "Coding Tasks" section to AGENTS.md that says: when spawning Claude Code sessions for coding work, tell the session to use gstack skills. Include these examples — security audit: "Load gstack. Run /cso", code review: "Load gstack. Run /review", QA test a URL: "Load gstack. Run /qa https://...", build a feature end-to-end: "Load gstack. Run /autoplan, implement the plan, then run /ship", plan before building: "Load gstack. Run /office-hours then /autoplan. Save the plan, don't implement."
After setup, just talk to your OpenClaw agent naturally:
| You say | What happens |
|---|---|
| "Fix the typo in README" | Simple — Claude Code session, no gstack needed |
| "Run a security audit on this repo" | Spawns Claude Code with Run /cso |
| "Build me a notifications feature" | Spawns Claude Code with /autoplan → implement → /ship |
| "Help me plan the v2 API redesign" | Spawns Claude Code with /office-hours → /autoplan, saves plan |
See docs/OPENCLAW.md for advanced dispatch routing and the gstack-lite/gstack-full prompt templates.
Native OpenClaw Skills (via ClawHub)
Four methodology skills that work directly in your OpenClaw agent, no Claude Code session needed. Install from ClawHub:
clawhub install gstack-openclaw-office-hours gstack-openclaw-ceo-review gstack-openclaw-investigate gstack-openclaw-retro
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
gstack-openclaw-office-hours |
Product interrogation with 6 forcing questions |
gstack-openclaw-ceo-review |
Strategic challenge with 4 scope modes |
gstack-openclaw-investigate |
Root cause debugging methodology |
gstack-openclaw-retro |
Weekly engineering retrospective |
These are conversational skills. Your OpenClaw agent runs them directly via chat.
Other AI Agents
gstack works on 10 AI coding agents, not just Claude. Setup auto-detects which agents you have installed:
git clone --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gstack.git ~/gstack
cd ~/gstack && ./setup
Or target a specific agent with ./setup --host <name>:
| Agent | Flag | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Codex CLI | --host codex |
Full install → ${CODEX_HOME:-~/.codex}/skills/gstack-*/ |
| OpenCode | --host opencode |
Full install → ~/.config/opencode/skills/gstack-*/ |
| Cursor | --host cursor |
Full install → ~/.cursor/skills/gstack-*/ |
| Factory Droid | --host factory |
Full install → ~/.factory/skills/gstack-*/ |
| Kiro | --host kiro |
Full install → ~/.kiro/skills/gstack-*/ |
| Slate | --host slate |
Pointer to the Claude install (Slate reads .claude/skills as a fallback) |
| OpenClaw | --host openclaw |
ACP spawn pointers + methodology artifacts via gen:skill-docs --host openclaw + the instruction-only digest below (full guide: docs/OPENCLAW.md) |
| Hermes | --host hermes |
Methodology artifacts via gen:skill-docs --host hermes + the instruction-only digest below |
| GBrain (mod) | --host gbrain |
Brain-aware skill variants, shipped from the GBrain repo |
Instruction-only tier (any rules-reading agent — Zed, Amp, Jules, side projects):
copy the 2KB digest at agents-digest/gstack-AGENTS.md
into a location your agent reads (for example, append it to your project's AGENTS.md).
It carries gstack's ethos, reuse ladder, and voice rules — no install required. The
digest's first line shows its gstack version; re-copy it after upgrading.
For Codex, setup reads the top-level model from
${CODEX_HOME:-~/.codex}/config.toml and generates the matching behavioral
profile. gpt-5.6-sol automatically receives bounded-scope instructions that
finish the requested lake without expanding into adjacent cleanup or speculative
hardening. The Sol profile is exact-match only: dated snapshots and other 5.6
variants get the generic GPT profile, and setup warns on near-misses like
gpt-5.6-sol-2026-08-01. Override detection with ./setup --host codex --model <id> — the
override applies to that run only; set model in your Codex config.toml to
make it stick across upgrades. After changing your Codex model, rerun
./setup --host codex to regenerate the skills.
Want to add support for another agent? See docs/ADDING_A_HOST.md. It's one TypeScript config file, zero code changes.
See it work
You: I want to build a daily briefing app for my calendar.
You: /office-hours
Claude: [asks about the pain — specific examples, not hypotheticals]
You: Multiple Google calendars, events with stale info, wrong locations.
Prep takes forever and the results aren't good enough...
Claude: I'm going to push back on the framing. You said "daily briefing
app." But what you actually described is a personal chief of
staff AI.
[extracts 5 capabilities you didn't realize you were describing]
[challenges 4 premises — you agree, disagree, or adjust]
[generates 3 implementation approaches with effort estimates]
RECOMMENDATION: Ship the narrowest wedge tomorrow, learn from
real usage. The full vision is a 3-month project — start with
the daily briefing that actually works.
[writes design doc → feeds into downstream skills automatically]
You: /plan-ceo-review
[reads the design doc, challenges scope, runs 10-section review]
You: /plan-eng-review
[ASCII diagrams for data flow, state machines, error paths]
[test matrix, failure modes, security concerns]
You: Approve plan. Exit plan mode.
[writes 2,400 lines across 11 files. ~8 minutes.]
You: /review
[AUTO-FIXED] 2 issues. [ASK] Race condition → you approve fix.
You: /qa https://staging.myapp.com
[opens real browser, clicks through flows, finds and fixes a bug]
You: /ship
Tests: 42 → 51 (+9 new). PR: github.com/you/app/pull/42
You said "daily briefing app." The agent said "you're building a chief of staff AI" — because it listened to your pain, not your feature request. Eight commands, end to end. That is not a copilot. That is a team.
The sprint
gstack is a process, not a collection of tools. The skills run in the order a sprint runs:
Think → Plan → Build → Review → Test → Ship → Reflect
Each skill feeds into the next. /office-hours writes a design doc that /plan-ceo-review reads. /plan-eng-review writes a test plan that /qa picks up. /review catches bugs that /ship verifies are fixed. Nothing falls through the cracks because every step knows what came before it.
| Skill | Your specialist | What they do |
|---|---|---|
/office-hours |
YC Office Hours | Start here. Six forcing questions that reframe your product before you write code. Pushes back on your framing, challenges premises, generates implementation alternatives. Design doc feeds into every downstream skill. |
/plan-ceo-review |
CEO / Founder | Rethink the problem. Find the 10-star product hiding inside the request. Four modes: Expansion, Selective Expansion, Hold Scope, Reduction. |
/plan-eng-review |
Eng Manager | Lock in architecture, data flow, diagrams, edge cases, and tests. Forces hidden assumptions into the open. |
/plan-design-review |
Senior Designer | Rates each design dimension 0-10, explains what a 10 looks like, then edits the plan to get there. AI Slop detection. Interactive — one AskUserQuestion per design choice. |
/plan-devex-review |
Developer Experience Lead | Interactive DX review: explores developer personas, benchmarks against competitors' TTHW, designs your magical moment, traces friction points step by step. Three modes: DX EXPANSION, DX POLISH, DX TRIAGE. 20-45 forcing questions. |
/design-consultation |
Design Partner | Build a complete design system from scratch. Researches the landscape, proposes creative risks, generates realistic product mockups. |
/review |
Staff Engineer | Find the bugs that pass CI but blow up in production. Auto-fixes the obvious ones. Flags completeness gaps. Advisory simplification lens flags over-built code — never blocks, never auto-applies. |
/investigate |
Debugger | Systematic root-cause debugging. Iron Law: no fixes without investigation. Traces data flow, tests hypotheses, stops after 3 failed fixes. |
/design-review |
Designer Who Codes | Same audit as /plan-design-review, then fixes what it finds. Atomic commits, before/after screenshots. |
/devex-review |
DX Tester | Live developer experience audit. Actually tests your onboarding: navigates docs, tries the getting started flow, times TTHW, screenshots errors. Compares against /plan-devex-review scores — the boomerang that shows if your plan matched reality. |
/design-shotgun |
Design Explorer | "Show me options." Generates 4-6 AI mockup variants, opens a comparison board in your browser, collects your feedback, and iterates. Taste memory learns what you like. Repeat until you love something, then hand it to /design-html. |
/design-html |
Design Engineer | Turn a mockup into production HTML that actually works. Pretext computed layout: text reflows, heights adjust, layouts are dynamic. 30KB, zero deps. Detects React/Svelte/Vue. Smart API routing per design type (landing page vs dashboard vs form). The output is shippable, not a demo. |
/qa |
QA Lead | Test your app, find bugs, fix them with atomic commits, re-verify. Auto-generates regression tests for every fix. |
/qa-only |
QA Reporter | Same methodology as /qa but report only. Pure bug report without code changes. |
/pair-agent |
Multi-Agent Coordinator | Share your browser with any AI agent. One command, one paste, connected. Works with OpenClaw, Hermes, Codex, Cursor, or anything that can curl. Each agent gets its own tab. Auto-launches headed mode so you watch everything. Auto-starts ngrok tunnel for remote agents. Scoped tokens, tab isolation, rate limiting, activity attribution. |
/cso |
Chief Security Officer | OWASP Top 10 + STRIDE threat model. Zero-noise: 17 false positive exclusions, 8/10+ confidence gate, independent finding verification. Each finding includes a concrete exploit scenario. |
/ship |
Release Engineer | Sync main, run tests, audit coverage, push, open PR. Bootstraps test frameworks if you don't have one. |
/land-and-deploy |
Release Engineer | Merge the PR, wait for CI and deploy, verify production health. One command from "approved" to "verified in production." |
/canary |
SRE | Post-deploy monitoring loop. Watches for console errors, performance regressions, and page failures. |
/benchmark |
Performance Engineer | Baseline page load times, Core Web Vitals, and resource sizes. Compare before/after on every PR. |
/document-release |
Technical Writer | Update all project docs to match what you just shipped. Catches stale READMEs automatically. Builds a Diataxis coverage map (reference / how-to / tutorial / explanation) so gaps are visible in the PR body. |
/document-generate |
Documentation Author | Generate missing docs from scratch using the Diataxis framework. Researches the codebase first, then writes reference / how-to / tutorial / explanation docs that actually match the code. Invokable standalone or chained from /document-release when the coverage map finds gaps. Learn more: tutorial • how-to • why Diataxis. |
/retro |
Eng Manager | Team-aware weekly retro. Per-person breakdowns, shipping streaks, test health trends, growth opportunities. /retro global runs across all your projects and AI tools (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini). |
/browse |
QA Engineer | Give the agent eyes. Real Chromium browser, real clicks, real screenshots. ~100ms per command. /open-gstack-browser launches GStack Browser with sidebar, anti-bot stealth, and auto model routing. |
/setup-browser-cookies |
Session Manager | Import cookies from your real browser (Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge) into the headless session. Test authenticated pages. |
/autoplan |
Review Pipeline | One command, fully reviewed plan. Runs CEO → design → DX → eng review automatically (eng always last, so the shipping gate reviews the final amended plan) with encoded decision principles. Surfaces only taste decisions for your approval. |
/spec |
Spec Author | Turn vague intent into a precise, executable spec in five phases (why, scope, technical with mandatory code-reading, draft, file). Codex quality gate before file (blocks below 7/10), fail-closed secret redaction, dedupe against existing issues, archive to $GSTACK_STATE_ROOT/projects/$SLUG/specs/ for team-corpus recall. --execute spawns claude -p in a fresh worktree; /ship auto-closes the source issue on merge. Plan-mode aware. |
/learn |
Memory | Manage what gstack learned across sessions. Review, search, prune, and export project-specific patterns, pitfalls, and preferences. Learnings compound across sessions so gstack gets smarter on your codebase over time. |
/make-pdf |
Publisher | Markdown in, publication-quality document out. Mermaid and excalidraw fences render as vector diagrams, fully offline. Images scale to the page and never truncate; wide diagrams get their own landscape page. --to html emits one self-contained file, --to docx a Word doc. |
/diagram |
Diagram Maker | English in, editable diagram out. Emits a triplet: mermaid source, .excalidraw you can open and edit on excalidraw.com (hand-drawn style), and rendered SVG/PNG. Zero network. Embed the source in markdown and /make-pdf renders it. |
Which review should I use?
| Building for... | Plan stage (before code) | Live audit (after shipping) |
|---|---|---|
| End users (UI, web app, mobile) | /plan-design-review |
/design-review |
| Developers (API, CLI, SDK, docs) | /plan-devex-review |
/devex-review |
| Architecture (data flow, perf, tests) | /plan-eng-review |
/review |
| All of the above | /autoplan (runs CEO → design → DX → eng, auto-detects which apply; eng always last) |
— |
Power tools
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
/codex |
Second Opinion — independent code review from OpenAI Codex CLI. Three modes: review (pass/fail gate), adversarial challenge, and open consultation. Cross-model analysis when both /review and /codex have run. |
/careful |
Safety Guardrails — warns before destructive commands (rm -rf, DROP TABLE, force-push). Say "be careful" to activate. Override any MEDIUM warning; root/home recursive deletes and default-branch force-pushes are hard-denied. |
/freeze |
Edit Lock — restrict file edits to one directory. Prevents accidental changes outside scope while debugging. |
/guard |
Full Safety — /careful + /freeze in one command. Maximum safety for prod work. |
/unfreeze |
Unlock — remove the /freeze boundary. |
/open-gstack-browser |
GStack Browser — launch GStack Browser with sidebar, anti-bot stealth, auto model routing (Sonnet for actions, Opus for analysis), one-click cookie import, and Claude Code integration. Clean up pages, take smart screenshots, edit CSS, and pass info back to your terminal. |
/setup-deploy |
Deploy Configurator — one-time setup for /land-and-deploy. Detects your platform, production URL, and deploy commands. |
/setup-gbrain |
GBrain Onboarding — from zero to running gbrain in under 5 minutes. PGLite local, Supabase existing URL, or auto-provision a new Supabase project via Management API. MCP registration for Claude Code + per-repo trust triad (read-write/read-only/deny). Full guide. |
/sync-gbrain |
Keep Brain Current — re-index this repo's code into gbrain via gbrain sources add + gbrain sync --strategy code, refresh the ## GBrain Search Guidance block in CLAUDE.md, and auto-remove guidance when the capability check fails. --incremental (default), --full, --dry-run. Idempotent; safe to re-run. |
/gstack-upgrade |
Self-Updater — upgrade gstack to latest. Detects global vs vendored install, syncs both, shows what changed. |
/ios-qa |
iOS Live-Device QA (v1.43.0.0+) — drive a real iPhone over USB CoreDevice via an embedded StateServer in the app. Read Swift source, codegen typed @Observable accessors, run the agent loop. Optional --tailnet flag exposes the device to OpenClaw or any HTTP-capable agent on your Tailscale tailnet so remote agents can run iOS QA without ever touching the hardware. Capability-tier allowlist (observe/interact/mutate/restore), per-device session lock, audit log. |
/ios-fix, /ios-design-review, /ios-clean, /ios-sync |
iOS bug-fix loop, designer's-eye HIG audit, debug-bridge cleanup, and accessor resync. See docs/skills.md. End-to-end walkthrough: docs/howto-ios-testing-with-gstack.md. |
Standalone binaries
Beyond the slash-command skills, gstack ships standalone CLIs for workflows that don't belong inside a session:
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
gstack-model-benchmark |
Cross-model benchmark — run the same prompt through Claude, GPT (via Codex CLI), and Gemini; compare latency, tokens, cost, and (optionally) LLM-judge quality score. Auth detected per provider, unavailable providers skip cleanly. Output as table, JSON, or markdown. --dry-run validates flags + auth without spending API calls. |
gstack-taste-update |
Design taste learning — writes approvals and rejections from /design-shotgun into a persistent per-project taste profile. Decays 5%/week. Feeds back into future variant generation so the system learns what you actually pick. |
gstack-egress |
Egress receipt auditor — every gstack-initiated off-machine send writes a tamper-evident, hash-chained receipt to ~/.gstack/security/egress.jsonl before the send. list shows what gstack attempted to send and to which host, grants shows the standing consent settings plus the exact command that revokes each, verify recomputes the hash chain and exits 3 on tamper (catches edits, reordering, and mid-chain deletion; truncating or deleting the ledger itself is out of scope — it's a forensic log, not tamper-proof storage). |
gstack-context-bill |
Token bill-of-materials — read-only, offline audit of what an installed skills tree costs in tokens: always-on frontmatter every session pays vs per-invocation SKILL.md + forced references. --diff compares two trees, --budget enforces a ceiling, --exact opts into Anthropic count_tokens (sends file text off-machine; writes an egress receipt first, degrades to the offline estimate if the receipt can't be written). |
gstack-code-intelligence |
Code-intelligence provider picker — wraps GBrain, Sourcebot, and Graphify behind one interface: options/status to see what's available, select to pick one, index/search to use it, suggest to check whether the one-time indexing offer should fire here. The offer triggers on large repos (1,000+ tracked files; a decline is persisted). Non-local providers refuse to index or search until you record per-repo consent (consent <repo> yes|no — the query text is repo-derived content), the per-repo trust policy's deny and read-only tiers veto write-class operations regardless of consent, and every off-machine send writes an egress receipt. Fully optional — with nothing selected, gstack falls back to grep. |
gstack-verify-gate |
Verification stop hook (opt-in) — blocks a Claude Code turn from ending until the project's declared verify command passes (after 3 blocked re-entries it yields with a loud still-RED warning instead of looping forever). Declare it on one line in CLAUDE.md: <!-- gstack:verify: bun test -->. Hooks bypass the permission system, so a declared command never runs until you trust it once per repo (gstack-verify-gate --trust); editing the command invalidates trust until re-granted, and every grant is audit-logged. ./setup never registers it for you — opt in with gstack-settings-hook add-event --event Stop --command ~/.claude/skills/gstack/bin/gstack-verify-gate --source verify-gate, remove with gstack-settings-hook remove-source --source verify-gate. |
gstack-wtree |
Working-tree fingerprint — prints a content hash of what's actually on disk (temp index seeded from the stat cache, ~40x cheaper than a full re-hash; untracked source counts, gitignored scratch doesn't). Identical content fingerprints identically through commits, rebases, amends, and squashes — it's what binds reviews and test evidence to content instead of commit SHAs. |
gstack-evidence |
Verification-evidence ledger — run --label <lane> -- <cmd> transparently wraps any test command (the child's exit code always passes through) and records what ran against which working-tree fingerprint; check grades each label FRESH/STALE/MISSING with --expect-cmd, --max-age, and --allow-paths binding. /ship and /land-and-deploy cite fresh evidence instead of re-running suites. Per-run logs are 0600, capped at 2MB, pruned after 30 days; the ledger and logs stay machine-local by design. |
gstack-issue-guard |
Tracker-text trust envelope — fetches GitHub issue/PR text (issue <n>, pr-body, pr-comments, or --stdin) and wraps it in a labeled envelope so agents treat it as data: injection-shaped lines get labeled even through fullwidth and invisible-character evasion, and forged envelope banners are defused. Every tracker-text ingress in gstack routes through it, enforced by a CI scanner. |
gstack-ios-qa-daemon |
iOS QA daemon — Mac-side broker between an agent and a connected iPhone over USB CoreDevice. Loopback by default; --tailnet opens a Tailscale-facing listener with identity-gated capability tiers. Single-instance via flock on ~/.gstack/ios-qa-daemon.pid. See docs/howto-ios-testing-with-gstack.md. |
gstack-ios-qa-mint |
iOS allowlist manager — owner-grant CLI for the tailnet allowlist. grant/revoke/list against ~/.gstack/ios-qa-allowlist.json (mode 0600). Remote agents never auto-allowlist; this is the explicit-intent path. |
gstack-ios-qa-regen |
iOS bridge regenerator — deterministically installs the canonical DebugBridge package, generates typed state accessors, and records the installed gstack version. Safe to rerun after source changes or upgrades. |
./setup also registers one default-on Stop hook in ~/.claude/settings.json:
gstack-timeline-stop (closes dangling session-timeline entries when a session
is interrupted; fail-open — 2s internal budget, always exits 0, can never block
a session). Opt out persistently with ./setup --no-timeline-stop-hook — the
choice lands in the timeline_stop_hook config key, survives upgrades, and an
explicit "no" removes a live registration. GSTACK_TIMELINE_STOP_HOOK=no and
gstack-config set timeline_stop_hook no work too (flag > env > config).
./setup --no-team skips it for that run, gstack-settings-hook remove-source --source gstack-timeline-stop removes it by hand, and gstack-uninstall
removes it too.
Hook registration is canonical-only: every hook command points at the stable
~/.claude/skills/gstack install, never the tree setup ran from, so deleting
a worktree or Conductor workspace can't leave dead hooks erroring in your
sessions. Every ./setup run also heals first: gstack-settings-hook prune-stale --repoint removes dead gstack hook entries, re-points stale ones
at the stable install, and collapses duplicates, printing one line (and
writing a backup beside the file) only when it changed something.
Continuous checkpoint mode (opt-in, local by default)
Set gstack-config set checkpoint_mode continuous and skills auto-commit your work as you go with a WIP: prefix plus a structured [gstack-context] body (decisions, remaining work, failed approaches). Survives crashes and context switches. /context-restore reads those commits to reconstruct session state. /ship filter-squashes WIP commits before the PR (preserving non-WIP commits) so bisect stays clean. Push is opt-in via checkpoint_push=true — default is local-only so you don't trigger CI on every WIP commit.
Domain skills + raw CDP escape hatch
Two new browser primitives compound the gstack agent over time:
$B domain-skill save— agent saves a per-site note (e.g., "LinkedIn's Apply button lives in an iframe") that fires automatically next time it visits that hostname. Quarantined → active after 3 successful uses → optional cross-project promotion via$B domain-skill promote-to-global. Storage lives alongside/learn's per-project learnings file. Full reference: docs/domain-skills.md.$B cdp <Domain.method>— raw Chrome DevTools Protocol escape hatch for the rare case curated commands miss. Deny-default: methods must be explicitly added tobrowse/src/cdp-allowlist.tswith a one-line justification. Two-tier mutex serializes browser-scoped CDP calls against per-tab work. Output for data-exfil methods is wrapped in the UNTRUSTED envelope.
Want raw CDP with no rails, no allowlist, no daemon — just thin transport from agent to Chrome? browser-use/browser-harness-js is a different philosophy (agent-authored helpers vs gstack's curated commands) and a good fit if you don't want gstack's security stack. The two can coexist: gstack's
$B cdpand harness can both attach to the same Chrome via Playwright'snewCDPSession.
Deep dives with examples and philosophy for every skill →
Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered.
Andrej Karpathy's AI coding rules (17K stars) nail four failure modes: wrong assumptions, overcomplexity, orthogonal edits, imperative over declarative. gstack's workflow skills enforce all four. /office-hours forces assumptions into the open before code is written. The Confusion Protocol stops Claude from guessing on architectural decisions. /review catches unnecessary complexity and drive-by edits. /ship transforms tasks into verifiable goals with test-first execution. If you already use Karpathy-style CLAUDE.md rules, gstack is the workflow enforcement layer that makes them stick across entire sprints, not just single prompts.
Parallel sprints
gstack works well with one sprint. It gets interesting with ten running at once.
Design is at the heart. /design-consultation builds your design system from scratch, researches what's out there, proposes creative risks, and writes DESIGN.md. But the real magic is the shotgun-to-HTML pipeline.
/design-shotgun is how you explore. You describe what you want. It generates 4-6 AI mockup variants using GPT Image. Then it opens a comparison board in your browser with all variants side by side. You pick favorites, leave feedback ("more whitespace", "bolder headline", "lose the gradient"), and it generates a new round. Repeat until you love something. Taste memory kicks in after a few rounds so it starts biasing toward what you actually like. No more describing your vision in words and hoping the AI gets it. You see options, pick the good ones, and iterate visually.
/design-html makes it real. Take that approved mockup (from /design-shotgun, a CEO plan, a design review, or just a description) and turn it into production-quality HTML/CSS. Not the kind of AI HTML that looks fine at one viewport width and breaks everywhere else. This uses Pretext for computed text layout: text actually reflows on resize, heights adjust to content, layouts are dynamic. 30KB overhead, zero dependencies. It detects your framework (React, Svelte, Vue) and outputs the right format. Smart API routing picks different Pretext patterns depending on whether it's a landing page, dashboard, form, or card layout. The output is something you'd actually ship, not a demo.
/qa was a massive unlock. It let me go from 6 to 12 parallel workers. Claude Code saying "I SEE THE ISSUE" and then actually fixing it, generating a regression test, and verifying the fix — that changed how I work. The agent has eyes now.
Smart review routing. Just like at a well-run startup: CEO doesn't have to look at infra bug fixes, design review isn't needed for backend changes. gstack tracks what reviews are run, figures out what's appropriate, and just does the smart thing. The Review Readiness Dashboard tells you where you stand before you ship.
Test everything. /ship bootstraps test frameworks from scratch if your project doesn't have one. Every /ship run produces a coverage audit. Every /qa bug fix generates a regression test. 100% test coverage is the goal — tests make vibe coding safe instead of yolo coding.
/document-release is the engineer you never had. It reads every doc file in your project, cross-references the diff, and updates everything that drifted. README, ARCHITECTURE, CONTRIBUTING, CLAUDE.md, TODOS — all kept current automatically. And now /ship auto-invokes it — docs stay current without an extra command.
Real browser mode. /open-gstack-browser launches GStack Browser, an AI-controlled Chromium with anti-bot stealth, custom branding, and the sidebar extension baked in. Sites like Google and NYTimes work without captchas. The menu bar says "GStack Browser" instead of "Chrome for Testing." Your regular Chrome stays untouched. All existing browse commands work unchanged. $B disconnect returns to headless. The browser stays alive as long as the window is open... no idle timeout killing it while you're working.
Sidebar agent — your AI browser assistant. Type natural language in the Chrome side panel and a child Claude instance executes it. "Navigate to the settings page and screenshot it." "Fill out this form with test data." "Go through every item in this list and extract the prices." The sidebar auto-routes to the right model: Sonnet for fast actions (click, navigate, screenshot) and Opus for reading and analysis. Each task gets up to 5 minutes. The sidebar agent runs in an isolated session, so it won't interfere with your main Claude Code window. One-click cookie import right from the sidebar footer.
Personal automation. The sidebar agent isn't just for dev workflows. Example: "Browse my kid's school parent portal and add all the other parents' names, phone numbers, and photos to my Google Contacts." Two ways to get authenticated: (1) log in once in the headed browser, your session persists, or (2) click the "cookies" button in the sidebar footer to import cookies from your real Chrome. Once authenticated, Claude navigates the directory, extracts the data, and creates the contacts.
Prompt injection defense. Hostile web pages try to hijack your sidebar agent. gstack ships a layered defense: content filters (datamarking, hidden-element stripping, ARIA scrubbing, URL blocklist) on every page read, plus a 22MB ML classifier running locally in a sidecar subprocess that scans page-derived content before the agent sees it, with a verdict combiner that requires classifier agreement before blocking (prevents single-model false positives on Stack Overflow-style instruction pages). Everything runs on your machine, no network calls. Emergency kill switch: GSTACK_SECURITY_OFF=1. See ARCHITECTURE.md for the full stack.
Browser handoff when the AI gets stuck. Hit a CAPTCHA, auth wall, or MFA prompt? $B handoff opens a visible Chrome at the exact same page with all your cookies and tabs intact. Solve the problem, tell Claude you're done, $B resume picks up right where it left off. The agent even suggests it automatically after 3 consecutive failures.
/pair-agent is cross-agent coordination. You're in Claude Code. You also have OpenClaw running. Or Hermes. Or Codex. You want them both looking at the same website. Type /pair-agent, pick your agent, and a GStack Browser window opens so you can watch. The skill prints a block of instructions. Paste that block into the other agent's chat. It exchanges a one-time setup key for a session token, creates its own tab, and starts browsing. You see both agents working in the same browser, each in their own tab, neither able to interfere with the other. If ngrok is installed, the tunnel starts automatically so the other agent can be on a completely different machine. Same-machine agents get a zero-friction shortcut that writes credentials directly. This is the first time AI agents from different vendors can coordinate through a shared browser with real security: scoped tokens, tab isolation, rate limiting, domain restrictions, and activity attribution.
Multi-AI second opinion. /codex gets an independent review from OpenAI's Codex CLI — a completely different AI looking at the same diff. Three modes: code review with a pass/fail gate, adversarial challenge that actively tries to break your code, and open consultation with session continuity. When both /review (Claude) and /codex (OpenAI) have reviewed the same branch, you get a cross-model analysis showing which findings overlap and which are unique to each.
Safety guardrails on demand. Say "be careful" and /careful warns before any destructive command — rm -rf, DROP TABLE, force-push, git reset --hard. /freeze locks edits to one directory while debugging so Claude can't accidentally "fix" unrelated code. /guard activates both. /investigate auto-freezes to the module being investigated.
Proactive skill suggestions. gstack notices what stage you're in — brainstorming, reviewing, debugging, testing — and suggests the right skill. Don't like it? Say "stop suggesting" and it remembers across sessions.
10-15 parallel sprints
gstack is powerful with one sprint. It is transformative with ten running at once.
Conductor runs multiple Claude Code sessions in parallel — each in its own isolated workspace. One session running /office-hours on a new idea, another doing /review on a PR, a third implementing a feature, a fourth running /qa on staging, and six more on other branches. All at the same time. I regularly run 10-15 parallel sprints — that's the practical max right now.
The sprint structure is what makes parallelism work. Without a process, ten agents is ten sources of chaos. With a process — think, plan, build, review, test, ship — each agent knows exactly what to do and when to stop. You manage them the way a CEO manages a team: check in on the decisions that matter, let the rest run.
Voice input (AquaVoice, Whisper, etc.)
gstack skills have voice-friendly trigger phrases. Say what you want naturally — "run a security check", "test the website", "do an engineering review" — and the right skill activates. You don't need to remember slash command names or acronyms.
Uninstall
Option 1: Run the uninstall script
If gstack is installed on your machine:
~/.claude/skills/gstack/bin/gstack-uninstall
This handles skills, symlinks, global state (~/.gstack/), project-local state, browse daemons, and temp files. Use --keep-state to preserve config and analytics. Use --force to skip confirmation.
Option 2: Manual removal (no local repo)
If you don't have the repo cloned (e.g. you installed via a Claude Code paste and later deleted the clone):
# 1. Stop browse daemons
pkill -f "gstack.*browse" 2>/dev/null || true
# 2. Remove per-skill directories whose SKILL.md points into gstack/
# (rm -rf, not rmdir — installed dirs also contain runtime-asset links)
find ~/.claude/skills -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d ! -name gstack 2>/dev/null |
while IFS= read -r dir; do
link="$dir/SKILL.md"
[ -L "$link" ] || continue
target=$(readlink "$link" 2>/dev/null) || continue
case "$target" in
gstack/*|*/gstack/*)
rm -rf "$dir"
;;
esac
done
# Directories gstack created carry a .gstack-owned marker (the only signal on
# Windows, where installs are file copies with no symlink to read)
for marker in ~/.claude/skills/*/.gstack-owned; do
[ -f "$marker" ] && rm -rf "$(dirname "$marker")"
done
# Alias skills install as copies (no symlink to detect) — remove by name
rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/_gstack-command ~/.claude/skills/connect-chrome 2>/dev/null
# 3. Remove gstack
rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/gstack
# 4. Remove global state
rm -rf ~/.gstack
# 5. Remove integrations (skip any you never installed)
rm -rf "${CODEX_HOME:-$HOME/.codex}/skills/gstack"* 2>/dev/null
rm -rf ~/.factory/skills/gstack* 2>/dev/null
rm -rf ~/.kiro/skills/gstack* 2>/dev/null
rm -rf ~/.openclaw/skills/gstack* 2>/dev/null
rm -rf ~/.cursor/skills/gstack* 2>/dev/null
rm -rf ~/.config/opencode/skills/gstack* 2>/dev/null
# 6. Remove temp files
rm -f /tmp/gstack-* 2>/dev/null
# 7. Per-project cleanup (run from each project root)
rm -rf .gstack .gstack-worktrees .claude/skills/gstack 2>/dev/null
rm -rf .agents/skills/gstack* .factory/skills/gstack* 2>/dev/null
Manual removal leaves gstack's hook entries behind in ~/.claude/settings.json
(the uninstall script removes all of them for you, including entries whose
_gstack_source tag was stripped). Edit that file and delete every hook whose
command path points into .claude/skills/gstack/: the SessionStart auto-update
hook, the AskUserQuestion PreToolUse/PostToolUse hooks, and the Stop hooks
(session timeline, plus verify-gate if you opted in). Left in place, they error
on every matching event once the install directory is gone.
Clean up CLAUDE.md
The uninstall script does not edit CLAUDE.md. In each project where gstack was added, remove the ## gstack and ## Skill routing sections.
Playwright
~/Library/Caches/ms-playwright/ (macOS) is left in place because other tools may share it. Remove it if nothing else needs it.
Free, MIT licensed, open source. No premium tier, no waitlist.
I open sourced how I build software. You can fork it and make it your own.
We're hiring. Want to ship real products at AI-coding speed and help harden gstack? Come work at YC — ycombinator.com/software Extremely competitive salary and equity. San Francisco, Dogpatch District.
GBrain — persistent knowledge for your coding agent
GBrain is a persistent knowledge base for AI agents — think of it as the memory your agent actually keeps between sessions. GStack gives you a one-command path from zero to "it's running, my agent can call it."
/setup-gbrain
Four paths, pick one:
- Supabase, existing URL — your cloud agent already provisioned a brain; paste the Session Pooler URL, now this laptop uses the same data.
- Supabase, auto-provision — paste a Supabase Personal Access Token; the skill creates a new project, polls to healthy, fetches the pooler URL, hands it to
gbrain init. ~90 seconds end-to-end. - PGLite local — zero accounts, zero network, ~30 seconds. Isolated brain on this Mac only. Great for try-first; migrate to Supabase later with
/setup-gbrain --switch. - Remote gbrain MCP — your brain runs on another machine (Tailscale, ngrok, internal LAN) or a teammate's server; paste an MCP URL and bearer token. Optionally pair with a local PGLite for symbol-aware code search in split-engine mode. Best for cross-machine memory without standing up a local DB.
After init, the skill offers to register gbrain as an MCP server for Claude Code (claude mcp add gbrain -- gbrain serve) so gbrain search, gbrain put, etc. show up as first-class typed tools — not bash shell-outs.
Keeping the brain current. Run /sync-gbrain from any repo to re-index its code into gbrain (incremental by default, --full for a full reindex, --dry-run to preview). The skill registers the cwd as a federated source via gbrain sources add, runs gbrain sync --strategy code, and writes a ## GBrain Search Guidance block to your project's CLAUDE.md so the agent prefers gbrain search/code-def/code-refs over Grep. The block is removed automatically if the capability check fails — no stale guidance pointing at tools that aren't installed.
Per-remote trust policy. Each repo on your machine gets one of three tiers:
read-write— agent can search the brain AND write new pages back from this reporead-only— agent can search but never writes (best for multi-client consultants: search the shared brain, don't contaminate it with Client A's work while in Client B's repo)deny— no gbrain interaction at all
The skill asks once per repo. The decision is sticky across worktrees and branches of the same remote.
GStack memory sync (different feature, same private-repo infra). Optionally pushes your gstack state (learnings, CEO plans, design docs, retros, developer profile) to a private git repo so your memory follows you across machines, with a one-time privacy prompt (everything allowlisted / artifacts only / off) and a defense-in-depth secret scanner that blocks AWS keys, tokens, PEM blocks, and JWTs before they leave your machine.
gstack-artifacts-init
Running gstack in Conductor? Conductor explicitly strips ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and OPENAI_API_KEY from every workspace's process env, so paid evals and gbrain embeddings won't work out of the box. Set GSTACK_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and GSTACK_OPENAI_API_KEY in Conductor's workspace env config instead — gstack's TS entry points promote them to canonical names at runtime. Full details and the contributor checklist for adding the import to new entry points: Conductor + GSTACK_* env vars.
Full monty — every scenario, every flag, every bin helper, every troubleshooting step: USING_GBRAIN_WITH_GSTACK.md
Other references: docs/gbrain-sync.md (sync-specific guide) • docs/gbrain-sync-errors.md (error index)
Docs
| Doc | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Skill Deep Dives | Philosophy, examples, and workflow for every skill (includes Greptile integration) |
| Diagrams & Document Formats | Mermaid/excalidraw fences in PDFs, image sizing and safety defaults, --to html|docx, /diagram triplets |
| Builder Ethos | Builder philosophy: Boil the Ocean, Search Before Building, three layers of knowledge |
| Using GBrain with GStack | Every path, flag, bin helper, and troubleshooting step for /setup-gbrain |
| GBrain Sync | Cross-machine memory setup, privacy modes, troubleshooting |
| Architecture | Design decisions and system internals |
| Browser Reference | Full command reference for /browse |
| Contributing | Dev setup, testing, contributor mode, and dev mode |
| Changelog | What's new in every version |
Privacy & Telemetry
gstack includes opt-in usage telemetry to help improve the project. Here's exactly what happens:
- Default is off. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you explicitly say yes.
- On first run, gstack asks if you want to share anonymous usage data. You can say no.
- What's sent (if you opt in): skill name, duration, success/fail, gstack version, OS. That's it.
- What's never sent: code, file paths, repo names, branch names, prompts, or any user-generated content.
- Change anytime:
gstack-config set telemetry offdisables everything instantly. - Every off-machine send is receipted. Any gstack-initiated network send — telemetry included — writes a hash-chained, tamper-evident receipt to
~/.gstack/security/egress.jsonlbefore the send; sensitive sinks refuse to send at all if the receipt can't be written. Audit withgstack-egress list, verify the chain withgstack-egress verify(exit 3 on tamper), see the standing consent settings withgstack-egress grants. The ledger records attempted sends so accidents are auditable — it's an audit trail, not a network firewall.
Data is stored in Supabase (open source Firebase alternative). The schema is in supabase/migrations/ — you can verify exactly what's collected. The Supabase publishable key in the repo is a public key (like a Firebase API key) — row-level security policies deny all direct access. Telemetry flows through validated edge functions that enforce schema checks, event type allowlists, and field length limits.
Local analytics are always available. Run gstack-analytics to see your personal usage dashboard from the local JSONL file — no remote data needed.
Troubleshooting
Skill not showing up? cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setup
/browse fails? cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && bun install && bun run build
Stale install? Run /gstack-upgrade — or set auto_upgrade: true in ~/.gstack/config.yaml
Want shorter commands? cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setup --no-prefix — switches from /gstack-qa to /qa. Your choice is remembered for future upgrades.
Want namespaced commands? cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setup --prefix — switches from /qa to /gstack-qa. Useful if you run other skill packs alongside gstack.
Codex says "Skipped loading skill(s) due to invalid SKILL.md"? Your Codex skill descriptions are stale. Fix: cd "${CODEX_HOME:-$HOME/.codex}/skills/gstack" && git pull && ./setup --host codex — or for repo-local installs: cd "$(readlink -f .agents/skills/gstack)" && git pull && ./setup --host codex
Windows users: gstack works on Windows 11 via Git Bash or WSL. Node.js is required in addition to Bun — Bun has a known bug with Playwright's pipe transport on Windows (bun#4253). The browse server automatically falls back to Node.js. Make sure both bun and node are on your PATH.
On Windows without Developer Mode (MSYS2 / Git Bash), setup falls back to file copies instead of symlinks because ln -snf produces frozen copies that don't refresh on git pull. Re-run cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setup after every git pull so your skill files match the repo. setup prints a one-line note reminding you. Unix and WSL keep symlinks and don't need the re-run.
Chromium install failed or hung during ./setup? The browser is best-effort:
setup records the reason, finishes registering every skill, and prints which
skills need Chromium (/qa, /qa-only, /design-review, /browse, make-pdf,
/pair-agent). Fix the cause and re-run ./setup. Knobs:
GSTACK_PLAYWRIGHT_INSTALL_TIMEOUT=<seconds> raises the download bound
(default 600) on slow links; GSTACK_SKIP_PLAYWRIGHT=1 skips the Chromium
install entirely (CI, no-browser boxes); GSTACK_CHROMIUM_NO_SANDBOX=1 is the
fix when Chromium installs but cannot launch because the host blocks
unprivileged user namespaces (Ubuntu 24.04+ AppArmor default, #2157).
Setup ended with "Not registered (a skill you own already uses the name; left untouched)"?
gstack only deletes or links over a skill entry it can prove it created: a
symlink into gstack, a directory carrying the .gstack-owned marker ./setup
writes into every directory it creates, or a SKILL.md that is byte-identical to
gstack's or carries the generated <!-- AUTO-GENERATED from ... --> banner. A
qa/ or ship/ you wrote yourself is left untouched by ./setup,
gstack-relink, and both prefix-mode flips, and the linker names it in the
final summary. Rename or move yours, or switch modes (./setup --prefix /
--no-prefix) so the names stop colliding. If you started your own skill from
a generated gstack SKILL.md and then edited it, that file is moved to
~/.gstack/backups/skills/<timestamp>/<skill>/SKILL.md before gstack's is
linked in, never deleted.
Claude says it can't see the skills? Make sure your project's CLAUDE.md has a gstack section. Add this:
## gstack
Use /browse from gstack for all web browsing. Never use mcp__claude-in-chrome__* tools.
Available skills: /office-hours, /plan-ceo-review, /plan-eng-review, /plan-design-review,
/design-consultation, /design-shotgun, /design-html, /review, /ship, /land-and-deploy,
/canary, /benchmark, /browse, /open-gstack-browser, /qa, /qa-only, /design-review,
/setup-browser-cookies, /setup-deploy, /setup-gbrain, /sync-gbrain, /retro, /investigate,
/document-release, /document-generate, /codex, /cso, /autoplan, /pair-agent, /careful, /freeze,
/guard, /unfreeze, /gstack-upgrade, /learn.
License
MIT. Free forever. Go build something.