gstack/docs/CONTRIBUTOR_REFERENCE.md

Contributor reference

Contributor-only detail moved verbatim from CLAUDE.md, which Claude Code loads into every session and caps at 40,000 characters (#2096, test/claude-md-size.test.ts). CLAUDE.md keeps a one-line pointer to each section here.

Skill size budgets

Token ceiling: Generated SKILL.md files trip a warning above 160KB (~40K tokens). This is a "watch for feature bloat" guardrail, not a hard gate. Modern flagship models have 200K-1M context windows, so 40K is 4-20% of window, and prompt caching makes the marginal cost of larger skills small. The ceiling exists to catch runaway preamble/resolver growth, not to force compression on carefully-tuned big skills (ship, plan-ceo-review, office-hours legitimately pack 25-35K tokens of behavior). If you blow past 40K, the right fix is usually: (1) look at WHAT grew, (2) if one resolver added 10K+ in a single PR, question whether it belongs inline or as a reference doc, (3) only compress carefully-tuned prose as a last resort — cuts to the coverage audit, review army, or voice directive have real quality cost.

A second, harder ceiling guards the DISCOVERY surface: test/catalog-budget.test.ts caps the aggregate frontmatter name + description across all skills at CATALOG_BUDGET_TOKEN_EQUIVALENTS (1,194 today; each new skill ratchets it) token-equivalents (260-byte per-skill sub-cap), counted through the shared census in test/helpers/skill-census.ts. This one is enforced, not a warning — every host loads the full catalog every session, so growth here taxes every conversation. The failure message carries the re-measure + ratchet protocol. bin/gstack-context-bill shows the full token bill-of-materials for a skills tree (always-on vs per-invocation, --diff, --budget; --exact opts into the real tokenizer and POSTs file text to api.anthropic.com with an egress receipt).

The context-budget ratchet (test/context-budget-ratchet.test.ts, free, runs in bun run test) pins ABSOLUTE ceilings on two more ledgers: the always-on FULL-frontmatter aggregate (catalog-budget counts only name+description) and each skill's per-invocation eager tokens (SKILL.md + forced-read references — size floors and parity ratios guard these relatively, not absolutely), graded against test/fixtures/context-budget.json. A skill that grows past its ceiling fails; a new skill fails until it's consciously budgeted. For legitimate growth or a landed reduction, re-run bun test/helpers/capture-context-budget.ts and commit the refreshed fixture in the same commit, so ceilings ratchet down and every win is locked.

Egress receipts

Egress receipts at every off-machine sink (v1.63.0.0+). Every gstack-initiated send off the machine MUST write a hash-chained receipt to ~/.gstack/security/egress.jsonl BEFORE the send: TypeScript callers use writeReceipt from lib/egress-receipt.ts; shell scripts source bin/gstack-egress-lib.sh and use _receipted_curl / _receipted_git. Failure polarity is per-class: fail-closed for sensitive sinks (brain-sync, memory-ingest, gbrain-sync, telemetry, ngrok tunnels, mcp-verify, supabase-provision, and the Memorable bridge's per-prompt memorable-recall hand-off), fail-open

• stderr warning for user-facing ones (design OpenAI calls, update-check, dashboards, git-class ops). The new-sink scanner in test/egress-receipt-wiring.test.ts fails CI on an unreceipted curl / git push / fetch to a non-loopback host unless the file carries a reasoned entry in its SCANNER_EXEMPT list (user-directed page fetches, reachability probes, instruction strings, skill prose) — if you add a new off-machine sink, wire it through the helpers and add it to the enumerated sink list. aside exec (a gstack-composed prompt sent to Aside's agent) is a fail-open user-facing sink: skills call it through the _aside_exec wrapper that scripts/resolvers/aside.ts renders, never bare. Inspect with bin/gstack-egress (list | verify, exit 3 on tamper | grants). Threat model: forensic observability of ATTEMPTED egress, not an exfiltration control.

Skill linking and ownership

Prefix setting: Setup creates real directories (not symlinks) at the top level with a SKILL.md symlink inside (e.g., qa/SKILL.md -> gstack/qa/SKILL.md), plus links to each skill's runtime assets (sections/, templates, checklists — everything except SKILL.md, tests, build output, and .tmpl sources). Alias skills (_gstack-command, connect-chrome) install as rewritten copies, never symlinks. This ensures Claude discovers them as top-level skills, not nested under gstack/. Names are either short (qa) or namespaced (gstack-qa), controlled by skill_prefix in ~/.gstack/config.yaml. Pass --no-prefix or --prefix to skip the interactive prompt.

Ownership gate (#2119): setup writes a .gstack-owned marker into every skill directory it creates, and setup (the linker, the alias installer, both prefix-flip cleanups, and the retired-skill prune) and bin/gstack-relink only delete or link over an entry they can prove is gstack's. Strong proof (a symlink resolving into gstack, or the marker) allows deleting or refreshing the whole directory. Weak proof (a real SKILL.md byte-identical to the source, or carrying gen-skill-docs' two-line banner) covers only that one file, and a weakly-proven file that differs is moved to ~/.gstack/backups/skills/<ts>/<skill>/SKILL.md before gstack links over it. Anything else is a foreign skill: skipped, and named in setup's final summary. The rule lives in two copies (setup and bin/gstack-relink); keep them in sync until the shared helper filed in TODOS.md lands. The retired-skill prune (_prune_stale_generated) applies the same strong/weak split to renders of skills that no longer exist, through its own gate (_owned_for_windows_refresh: a real host directory is a candidate only when its SKILL.md carries the generated banner; the marker and byte identity are not consulted): it scans the render tree and every host skills dir, deletes a real render directory, removes a host symlink only when it resolves into gstack, cleans a bannered real directory through _cleanup_weak_dir, never follows a symlink inside the render tree, and recognizes a skill renamed through its frontmatter name:. Pinned by test/setup-link-ownership.test.ts, test/setup-cleanup-orphans.test.ts, test/setup-prune-stale-generated.test.ts, and test/relink.test.ts.

Redaction guard

Shared redaction engine catches credentials, PII, and legal/damaging content before it reaches an external sink (codex dispatch, GitHub issue/PR body, pushed commit). It is a guardrail, not airtight enforcement — git push --no-verify, direct gh issue create, and GSTACK_REDACT_PREPUSH=skip all bypass it. It catches accidents and carelessness, the 99% case. Do not claim it stops a determined leaker (a CHANGELOG line that does would fail a hostile screenshotter).

• Engine + taxonomy: lib/redact-patterns.ts (the single source of truth — 3 tiers; HIGH = genuinely-secret credentials that block, MEDIUM = PII/legal/ internal + high-FP credential shapes that confirm via AskUserQuestion, LOW = FYI) and lib/redact-engine.ts (pure scan() + applyRedactions()). Calibration matters: a gate that cries wolf gets ignored, so context-variable shapes (Stripe pk_live_, Google AIza, JWT, env *_KEY=) sit at MEDIUM.
• CLI: bin/gstack-redact (exit 0 clean / 2 MEDIUM / 3 HIGH; --json, --auto-redact, --repo-visibility, --from-file). bin/gstack-redact-prepush is the opt-in git hook.
• Skill docs are generated from scripts/resolvers/redact-doc.ts ({{REDACT_INVOCATION_BLOCK:<sink>}}) so /spec, /cso, /ship, /document-release, /document-generate never drift from the engine.
• Scan-at-sink: always scan the EXACT bytes that will be sent — write to a temp file, scan that file, pass the SAME file to gh/git. Never scan a string then re-render (that reopens a scan-vs-send gap).
• Visibility (no tier promotion): resolve once per run, order = local config (gstack-config get redact_repo_visibility, ~/.gstack so never committed) → gh → glab → unknown(=public-strict). Public repos get STERNER per-finding confirmation (no batch-acknowledge, no silent-proceed); MEDIUM is never auto-promoted to HIGH.
• Tool-attributed fences: wrap Codex/Greptile/eval output in ```codex-review / ```greptile fences so example credentials those tools quote WARN-degrade instead of blocking. A live-format credential inside the fence still blocks.
• Config keys: redact_repo_visibility (public|private|unknown, local-only override for repos gh/glab can't read), redact_prepush_hook (true|false). There is intentionally NO key to disable HIGH blocking.
• Audit: the /spec semantic pass appends a content-free record (categories + body sha256, no spec text) to ~/.gstack/security/semantic-reviews.jsonl (0600).

Checking out PRs from garrytan-agents

When the user says "check out " and the PR is from garrytan-agents/gstack (or any other fork that is NOT a collaborator on garrytan/gstack), do NOT just gh pr checkout. Fork PRs don't receive base-repo secrets (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY, etc.), so the eval/E2E CI jobs fail with empty-env auth errors regardless of what's set on the base repo.

Workflow: push the branch to garrytan/gstack (the base repo) and re-target the PR from there.

Concretely, after gh pr checkout <N>:

1. Note the original PR number and head branch name.
2. Push the same branch to the base repo: git push origin HEAD:<branch-name> (origin = garrytan/gstack, since the worktree is set up with that remote).
3. Close the fork PR (gh pr close <N> --comment "moving to base-repo branch for secret access").
4. Open a new PR from the base-repo branch: gh pr create --base main --head <branch-name>.
5. New PR's workflows will get secrets automatically.

Why not fix it on the fork side? garrytan-agents isn't a collaborator on garrytan/gstack. Adding it as a collaborator (option A) or flipping the repo-wide "send secrets to fork PRs" toggle (option B) would let secrets reach fork PRs from anyone — broader blast radius than just moving this one branch. Option C (this section) keeps secret-distribution scope tight.

If the user asks you to skip the move (e.g., "just leave it as a fork PR"), respect that — eval CI will fail with empty-env auth, but check-freshness, workflow-lint, and windows-tests will still pass on the fork PR.