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2db0b3adc8 v1.91.19.0 fix: severe fix wave (truthful gates, no lost memory, every host finds gstack) (#3025 )

* docs: approved severe fix wave plan (Oct 2026)

* D0: keep a project's .env and bunfig.toml out of compiled binaries and daemon children

Compiled binaries are built with --no-compile-autoload-dotenv and
--no-compile-autoload-bunfig; the browse server and terminal agent are
spawned with --no-env-file and an empty config, so a repo's .env cannot set
GSTACK_CHROMIUM_NO_SANDBOX and a bunfig preload cannot run code in them.
Verified on Bun 1.4.0.

* A9: --no-write is a dry run and leaves ingest state untouched

--no-write stamped every prepared page ingested_at and saved state, so a
later real run skipped those pages forever. It now prepares and reports
pages without importing or changing the state file.

Tests that used GSTACK_MEMORY_INGEST_NO_WRITE / --no-write to seed state
move to an explicit seam (a fake gbrain that accepts every staged page),
because the --no-write contract deliberately changes.

* H #2885 #2827: vector geometry is not phone or card PII

pii.phone.e164 accepts "." as a group separator, so a single float
(viewBox="0 0 581.66796875 ...") and a run of path coordinates
("37.6188 101.694") read as phone numbers. pii.cc's \b stops at a decimal
point, so the long fraction of an .excalidraw float is a Luhn candidate.
Excalidraw's seed/versionNonce/updated integers read as bare phone numbers.
A rendered /diagram triplet raised 18 (svg) and 97 (excalidraw) MEDIUM
findings on main; it now raises none.

- looksLikeDecimalCoordinates (ported from #2885, extended to a single
decimal and refusing a leading "+", the E.164 marker)
- insideDecimalNumber: a cc span glued to "<digit>." or ".<digit>"
- isNumericMetadataValue: an unquoted JSON value under a seed, nonce or
timestamp key; the same digits under "phone" still report

Controls: E.164 in prose, dotted and spaced phones, "+"-prefixed runs,
"phone"/"contact" JSON numbers, Luhn-valid cards in prose and at sentence end.

Co-authored-by: Lewis <lewispeel@hotmail.com>

* D1: pin the terminal-agent /ws Origin to the gstack extension (#1324)

GSTACK_EXTENSION_ID moves to browse/src/extension-id.ts, shared by
/extension-token and the terminal agent's /ws gate. /ws now returns 403 for
every origin except the pinned extension. Forks override the ID with
gstack-config set browse_extension_id <id>, honored by both routes; the
BROWSE_EXTENSION_ID env var is no longer read. Test sites that used fake
extension IDs now use the pinned origin.

* H #2899: env.kv skips a function call assigned to a credential name

`session = _FlakySession(...)`, `token = make_token(user, ...)` and
`password = getpass.getpass()` raised env.kv MEDIUM, which blocks the
fail-closed decision log. The exemption needs the line's evidence, not the
span's shape: the value is unquoted, is an identifier or dotted path
followed by "(", and the call closes on the line or opens a multi-line
argument list. Quoted values, unclosed "(" inside an unquoted secret
(API_SECRET=Abc123xyz(9Qm) and calls carrying a high-entropy literal
argument still report. The literal check is shared with the #2912 env-read
exemption.

Co-authored-by: Yugz <yannduzelier@gmail.com>

* H #2962: per-machine config filenames are not internal hostnames

`CLAUDE.local.md` and `settings.local.json` reported internal.hostname
MEDIUM (the pattern's \b stops at the dot before the extension), which fails
closed in the decision log. A span immediately followed by a known config
extension (.md .json .jsonc .yaml .yml .toml .ini .conf .txt) and a word
boundary is a filename. Controls: `ssh build.local`, `printer.local.` at a
sentence end, `printer.local/md`, `printer.local.mdx`, a host with a port,
`api.corp`, `build-7.internal`. The `.env.local` vectors (#2740) pass on
main already via isDotenvFilename and are pinned here as regressions.

Co-authored-by: Florian <florian.cleyetmerle@gmail.com>

* H #2784: four-part versions need a version declaration, not a shape

`"version": "1.128.1.0"`, `<Version>`, `AssemblyVersion("1.0.0.0")` and
Keep a Changelog headings raised pii.ip_public MEDIUM on every release,
because a four-part version is byte-for-byte a dotted quad. Exempt only when
the same line declares it a version immediately before the value (a version
key or word, an XML tag, an attribute call, or a `## [x]` heading). The same
digits after host:/server =/"upstream", bare on a line, or after prose that
merely mentions a version still report. Unlike #2784, this does not exempt a
value because the same string is declared a version elsewhere in the text:
that let a real address sharing a diff with a matching version slip. The
pre-push hook's VERSION-file rule (#2856) is unchanged.

Co-authored-by: cdecook23 <decook23@gmail.com>

* H #2913: postgres:postgres is exempt only on a loopback host

The postgres image's default pair in compose files and CI DATABASE_URLs
blocked pushes as db.url_with_password HIGH. It is now exempt only for
postgres/postgresql URLs with exactly postgres:postgres on localhost or
127.0.0.1 (optional port). A bare single-label host (`db`, `postgres`), any
other host, a host that merely starts with localhost (`localhost.evil...`,
`localhost@prod-db`), any other user or password, and other schemes still
block. #2913 exempted the pair on any host; this keeps the plan's narrower
rule.

Co-authored-by: mb1810 <michael.berger1810@gmail.com>

* G1: ship without a version when no version source is configured

Resolve the version source to four outcomes (valid, absent, ambiguous,
broken) in lib/version-source.ts and read that one signal in
gstack-version-bump (new NO_VERSION state; write refuses to invent a
VERSION), gstack-next-version (no_version, no slot), /ship's bump,
CHANGELOG and title steps, /land-and-deploy's drift check and
/document-release. A configured version file that is missing, empty,
unreadable or malformed stops with its path; 0.0.0.0 is never
substituted. docs/skills.md documents .gstack/version-path.

Migrates two tests that pinned the old fabricated-0.0.0.0 behavior.

Co-authored-by: Koda <koda@edgeviewfinance.com.au>
Co-authored-by: Merit Blake <merit@newsprint.com>

* H #2949: eval credential screen checks every name segment

The hermetic eval env admits GITHUB_* and EVALS_* metadata but rejects
credential-shaped names, judged only by the last underscore segment. A
trailing qualifier carried a credential through: GITHUB_APP_PRIVATE_KEY_BASE64,
GITHUB_TOKEN_1, EVALS_API_KEY_FALLBACK reached eval children. The screen
now rejects a name when any segment is a credential word; segments, not
substrings, so GITHUB_PATH / GITHUB_TOKENIZER / GITHUB_KEYRING stay
metadata, and explicit runner admissions still win.

Co-authored-by: Nguyen Thanh Dat <ntdat812@gmail.com>

* H #2915: cover chunked scanning of large multi-file push diffs

Test-only coverage for behavior already on main: a clean two-file pushed
diff over the engine's 1 MiB cap passes without engine.input_too_large, and
a credential at the end of the second file (a later scan chunk) still
blocks the push.

Co-authored-by: pneumorea-ai <pneumorea@gmail.com>

* A3: keep a project's DATABASE_URL away from a PGLite brain

With a PGLite config, buildGbrainEnv returned the caller env unchanged, so
a project's .env DATABASE_URL (autoloaded by Bun) reached gbrain: a false
broken-db at best, gbrain talking to the app's own Postgres at worst.
Inherited DATABASE_URL and GBRAIN_DATABASE_URL are now blanked for PGLite
configs (GSTACK_RESPECT_ENV_DATABASE_URL=1 still keeps them), and every
gbrain child runs from gbrain's config dir instead of the user's project,
so it cannot reload the project's .env / .env.local.

The old test that pinned pass-through for an engine:pglite config is
migrated: pass-through now applies only to configs that name neither a
database_url nor PGLite.

Co-authored-by: maxpetrusenkoagent <max.petrusenko.agent@gmail.com>

* C9: guard destructive gstack-upgrade and spec fences against unset or wrong paths

Fresh-shell hosts (and Claude Code, which keeps cwd but not shell variables)
ran cd "$INSTALL_DIR" with an empty variable, so git checkout/stash/reset
targeted the user's project. Step 2 now prints an absolute path; every
destructive fence starts with cd -- "${VAR:?...}" || exit 1 and checks it is
gstack's own checkout before any git command. /spec's worktree and spawn
fences get the same guard.

* F4: keep every paid design variant across regenerate rounds

$D variants now reserves a collision-safe round-<N>/ directory per run
(atomic mkdir) and writes a manifest.json of what each round saved. The
paid image request and the local write retry separately: a write failure
retries the write (temp + rename) and, if the path stays unwritable,
keeps the bytes in the temp dir instead of buying the image again.
Responsive variants land in their round directory too.

Readers updated: design-shotgun reserves a round dir and a private temp
dir for its parallel agents and records approved_path/round in
approved.json; design-html resolves approved_path (legacy letters still
work) and finds round-dir variants; design-consultation checks the
printed paths; the gallery shows round-dir variants. Variants that were
already overwritten before this change cannot be recovered.

Migrates the consultation contract test that pinned the flat path.

Co-authored-by: Matt Van Horn <mvanhorn@gmail.com>

* A2: stage dot-leading slugs gbrain can collect; network errors are db-unreachable

A page slug segment starting with a dot (a .claude project) staged a file
gbrain's import walker prunes, so the batch was refused on every run.
Leading dots become "dot-" per segment, and slugs recorded in state under
the old name map through the same function so no page is duplicated.

A DNS or connection failure (ENOTFOUND, EAI_AGAIN, ECONNREFUSED, ...) no
longer classifies as broken-db, which routed users to move a working
config aside. The new db-unreachable status carries the reason
"database host unreachable (<code> <host>); your gbrain config is
unchanged. Fix: check network or VPN, then re-run /sync-gbrain.", skips
local sync stages with that reason, and counts as usable for
gstack-gbrain-detect --is-ok like timeout.

Co-authored-by: Infiniteyieldai <infiniteyield.ai@gmail.com>

* D2: one address classifier for navigation literals, DNS answers, redirects and page-driven navigations (#2811)

classifyAddress() in url-validation.ts blocks 169.254.0.0/16 (metadata and
container credential endpoints), 100.100.100.200, fe80::/10 and fc00::/7,
including IPv4-mapped, IPv4-compatible and NAT64 spellings and decimal,
octal and hex IPv4. validateNavigationUrl, the A/AAAA answer check and
session-persist's cookie-domain guard all use it. BrowserManager now checks
every navigation request (redirect hops, link clicks, scripted navigations):
a blocked target resets the tab to about:blank and the write command fails
with the reason. Connection-time DNS rebinding remains out of scope.

Co-authored-by: Gabriel Rondon <grondon@gmail.com>

* C4: external hosts point at carved sections relative to the installed skill

Publishes the pointer form setup matches: on every non-Claude host a carved
section is `sections/<file>` relative to the installed gstack-<skill> SKILL.md
directory (QA's existing form), never $GSTACK_ROOT/<skill>/sections/, which
does not exist in external runtime roots. No render changes yet: only QA is
carved on external hosts today.

* INV-1: gate outcome contract for outside reviews

classifyOutsideReview() returns separate execution, findings and verdict
fields from text, stderr and exit status; reason codes, anchors and fix
actions live in lib/gate-outcomes.ts. validateOutsideReview() stays as the
text-only wrapper and the two-argument CLI keeps exit 0/1/2 for importers
and installed skills that predate a re-render. The --verdict form (implied
by --stderr/--exit) prints VERDICT/FINDINGS/REASON and exits 0/3/4/1; the
generated outside-voice caller moves to it and branches on each status
(unverified prints OUTSIDE_STATUS: unverified, never completed).

Adds docs/troubleshooting.md with one anchored section per reason code, the
anchor test, and the gate-tail lint (query scripts may not swallow failures,
gate calls may not end in || true, other best-effort tails say why).

* G1: quote the base placeholder in document-release title sync

The title-sync block is checked with bash -n; an unquoted <base> parses
as a redirection. Migrates the test that pinned the old root VERSION
read to the shared classifier call.

* G3: give every logging-bin mktemp a ${TMPDIR:-/tmp} template

Bare mktemp, mktemp -t and literal /tmp templates in the learnings,
question and preference logs (plus jsonl-merge, distill, the two
dashboards, /ship's PR body and /document-release's run dir) now use
"${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/<name>.XXXXXX", the form the INV-3 lint accepts. When
the temp file cannot be created, the learnings, question and preference
logs now say the entry was not recorded and how to fix TMPDIR instead of
exiting with only mktemp's own error. Three tests that pinned the bare
PR_BODY_FILE=$(mktemp) and one that pinned the /tmp run dir migrate.

GNU and BSD mktemp already honor TMPDIR without a template, so the
macOS-sandbox drop in #2952 is unverified here; the template makes the
temp location explicit on every mktemp.

Co-authored-by: Davon Johnson <d.johnson@dayofshow.net>

* B1b: structured outside-review gate fails on P0 as well as P1

validateOutsideReview() derived its structured pass/fail from a [P1] match,
so a review reporting only [P0] findings passed. The wrapper now reads the
classifier's findings verdict (P0 or P1), and the /review and /ship
structured-gate prose requests [P0]-[P3] tags and fails on P0/P1; untagged
output (OUTSIDE_STATUS: unverified) is missing coverage. The ship clarity
pin moves from 'structured P1' to 'structured P0/P1' with the behavior.

* E1: freeze normalizes boundary and target the same way on Windows; hooks spawn through cmd.exe (#2876, #2354)

gstack_hook_normalize_path (careful/bin/hook-extract.sh) maps C:\..., c:/...,
UNC \\server\share (leading // kept) and /cygdrive/c to one form; check-freeze
runs both the saved boundary and file_path through it before the absolute
test, after symlink resolution, and compares case-insensitively on Windows
bash. freeze, guard and careful register hooks as
bash -c "exec bash \"$HOME/...\"" so cmd.exe, which never expands $HOME,
no longer turns the hook into a silent exit 127.

Co-authored-by: Kevin Grasso <kevin@biblingo.com>
Co-authored-by: Xuan-Ce Wang <261591073+xwang4-svg@users.noreply.github.com>

* G4: keep CLI-to-daemon loopback calls off HTTP_PROXY (#494)

The CLI appends 127.0.0.1, localhost and ::1 to the user's NO_PROXY (and
no_proxy), keeping existing entries, before its first fetch. Verified on
Bun 1.4.0: fetch honors NO_PROXY when it is set before the first request
and ignores later changes, so it is set at the top of main().

* F1: bind the plan audit to this branch's plan, never the newest file

Plan File Discovery now prefers an explicit binding (the plan-mode file
or /autoplan ACTIVE_PLAN from the conversation, then a "Plan: <path>"
line in the PR body), then lists candidates: repo-committed
docs/designs/ files this branch changed or that name it, and personal
plan files that name the branch. Candidates are offered, never picked
silently. The repo-name match and the newest-file-of-the-day fallback,
which audited PRs against unrelated plans, are gone. With nothing bound
or chosen it prints the exact line 'Plan completion audit: not run (...).
Fix: add "Plan: <path>" to the PR body, or run /autoplan.'

/ship's parent now binds the plan before dispatching the audit
subagent ({{PLAN_COMPLETION_GATE_SHIP:discovery}}), so the child never
searches. Migrates three tests that pinned the old markers and notice.

Co-authored-by: loulanyue <260355617@qq.com>

* G5: browse type --selector <sel> <text> (#2936)

--selector focuses the element (sel or @ref) and types into it. The bare
form still types its text literally into the focused element; text that
starts with -- goes after a -- separator. When the first word looks like a
CSS selector, the result adds a hint to use --selector without echoing the
typed text, and never refuses based on page contents. Help and command
usage updated.

Co-authored-by: Thomas Reuser <thomasreuser@gmail.com>

* F2: design-doc discovery reads docs/designs, never a root DESIGN.md

A root DESIGN.md is the design system /design-consultation writes, so
preferring it unconditionally reviewed plans against a token file while
printing "Design doc found" and never looked at docs/designs/ feature
docs. Discovery now considers only docs/designs/*.md as the repo-local
design doc (still freshness-compared with the private ~/.gstack copy).
The CEO finding fixture seeds its supplied design as a docs/designs doc
and its test follows.

Co-authored-by: Bit0ps <alex.dreamscaper@gmail.com>

* C4: rename the external carve test (typecheck:test union-order artifact)

tsc prints a union's members in type-creation order; a test file sorting
before ceo-mode-option.test.ts reordered one baseline diagnostic's text.

* C1: every env-var host fence resolves its own gstack root

Codex and the other env-var hosts run each block in a fresh shell, so
GSTACK_ROOT/BIN, B and D set by the preamble were empty in later blocks
(/bin/gstack-slug, B=/browse). scripts/resolvers/runtime-root.ts now owns
root resolution: a valid exported GSTACK_ROOT (bin/ and lib/), else the
per-install literal root (no git call), else repo-local, else the global root
(CODEX_HOME on Codex); no root prints the setup fix line and exits. One
post-render pass inserts it (<=400 bytes) into every fence that uses these
variables without assigning them; B/D come from the same helper as BROWSE
and DESIGN SETUP. Claude output is byte-identical.

Migrated pins of the old preamble lines (gen-skill-docs.test.ts) and a
fixture whose exported GSTACK_ROOT lacked lib/ (skill-positional-literals).

* E8: headless browse honors GSTACK_CHROMIUM_PATH; extensions load in new headless mode (#2771, #1968, #2281)

The headless launch passes GSTACK_CHROMIUM_PATH as executablePath, scopes
the XProtect self-heal out for that bundle, and names the path in a launch
failure with the fix. BROWSE_EXTENSIONS_DIR now launches a persistent
context under the project state dir with --headless=new, so the extension
runs and no window appears (the off-screen window was visible on macOS and
the extension never ran in an isolated newContext). The GPU source guard
test moves from the removed useHeadless flag to launch() vs launchHeaded().

Co-authored-by: oli548 <312288720+oli548@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Slava <slava.istomin@tuta.io>
Co-authored-by: ryanlaiwy <129729476+ryanlaiwy@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: 李翊楠 <yinanli1917@gmail.com>

* C2: link design/dist and make-pdf/dist into every host runtime root and the agents sidecar

Codex design and make-pdf skills fall back to $GSTACK_DESIGN and
$GSTACK_MAKE_PDF under the runtime root, but setup linked only browse/dist,
so both preflights reported NOT_AVAILABLE on a fresh install. One helper
links dist/ only (make-pdf/ ships a Claude SKILL.md) into the Codex,
Factory, OpenCode, Cursor, Copilot and Kiro roots, the .agents sidecar and
the Cursor sidecar.

Co-authored-by: Mammad M. <mammad@digit.az>

* C3: install router and nested SKILL.md files as real copies; back up hand edits; --status checks

Codex skips a symlinked SKILL.md file, so the gstack router linked into
~/.codex/skills/gstack was invisible. Every host runtime root (Codex,
Factory, OpenCode, Cursor, Copilot, Kiro) and Kiro's per-skill installs
now get real copies, rewritten on every run (the auto-update path runs
setup --refresh-registered, so it refreshes them too). setup records each
copy's hash in <state root>/skill-copies.tsv; a copy that no longer matches
is saved to a uniquely named backup under <state root>/backups/skill-copies/
before _activate_runtime_root replaces the tree, and a failed backup keeps
the old tree. setup prints what it refreshed or removed.

./setup --status now prints, per registered install, whether the router is a
real file and whether every section pointer resolves, with the fix command.

Test migration: setup-codex-model pinned the Kiro router/upgrade links as
_link_or_copy; C3 deliberately changes them to copies.

* INV-3: install-level host conformance checks (no symlinked SKILL.md, dist present, section pointers resolve)

For codex, kiro, factory, opencode, cursor and copilot, the real-setup
conformance kit now fails when an installed SKILL.md is a symlink, when
design/dist or make-pdf/dist is missing from the runtime root, or when a
'Read `.../sections/<f>.md`' pointer in an installed SKILL.md does not
resolve (bare pointers in carved skills, relative-to-installed-skill
pointers, and $GSTACK_ROOT/~/absolute/../ pointers everywhere), and
./setup --status must report 'all resolve'. No new setup runs.

Expected red until the generator lane lands: design-html's install-offer
pointer and plan-eng-review's review-sections pointer name
$GSTACK_ROOT/<skill>/sections/... on every external host.

* B11: auto-update tracks pull, setup and migrations; announces only on success; retries with backoff

gstack-session-update wrote the 'just upgraded' marker after SETUP_FAILED or
SETUP_SKIPPED bun_missing, and re-ran setup only when HEAD moved, so a failed
install was announced as an upgrade and never retried. Stages are now
persisted in <state root>/session-update-pending; the marker is written only
when every stage succeeded; a pending setup or migrations stage is retried
even with HEAD unchanged after the update-check interval, then 6h, then 24h;
and each session start prints one line naming the stage, the reason and the
repair command while it is pending. Best-effort tails carry a same-line
reason.

* D1: gstack-config key browse_extension_id for forks and self-built extensions

The browse daemon trusts one Chrome extension ID on /extension-token and the
terminal-agent /ws. The override now lives only in gstack-config (never an
env var a project .env could set): empty by default (gstack's published
extension), a 32-letter a-p Chrome ID when set, "" clears it, and anything
else is rejected with the stored value kept. The browse lane reads it.

gstack-config-defaults: browse/src counts as a reader directory; the key is
listed prose-only until the browse lane's reader lands (the stale-entry check
then asks for the entry's removal).

* G2: key the sticky slug cache on the git common dir

A linked worktree used to resolve its slug fresh from the remote while
the main checkout kept its sticky pre-remote identity, so learnings,
checkpoints and timelines split into two buckets. gstack-slug and its
TS twin in lib/bin-context.ts now key the cache on the git common dir
(read from .git files, no git spawn, so cache hits stay git-free) and
read entries in one deterministic order: the repository entry, then the
main checkout's pre-upgrade entry, then this directory's own. Both the
repository and per-path entries are written.

When a worktree's own old entry named a different bucket that still
holds data, that slug is recorded in projects/<slug>/.former-slugs and
reported by --get FORMER_SLUGS. New --adopt-legacy --from <slug> merges
it: JSONL logs append missing lines with de-duplication, missing files
copy, differing files are listed as conflicts and never overwritten,
the source bucket is kept, and it prints migrated/pending/conflicting
counts; reruns are idempotent. --adopt-legacy --dismiss <slug> drops
the reminder.

Co-authored-by: loulanyue <260355617@qq.com>

* C5: OpenCode /gstack-* commands load the skill by its frontmatter name

OpenCode's skill tool knows gstack-review as `review` (its frontmatter
name), and OpenCode's builtin /review shadows that name as a command. The
managed /gstack-review command told the agent to load `gstack-review`,
a name the skill tool does not list. Every managed command now names the
frontmatter name. OpenCode's AskUserQuestion/ExitPlanMode mapping (#2759)
already shipped in v1.91.16.0.

Test migration: the #2629 commands test pinned the directory name.

Co-authored-by: Lockyer <135391289+Lockyer228@users.noreply.github.com>

* E4: Windows node-server bundle keeps sharp and socks external; CLI resolves its server script lazily (#2260, #2439)

build-node-server.sh passes --external sharp and --external socks (Bun on
Windows refuses to inline them; on Linux they were silently inlined). The
CLI no longer resolves server.ts or server-node.mjs at module load:
resolveServerLaunch() runs when a server starts, so a Windows minimal
runtime with only server-node.mjs works and a missing script is reported
only when one is needed.

Co-authored-by: Spooks444 <193448029+Spooks444@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: punksterlabs <77217235+punksterlabs@users.noreply.github.com>

* B1: Codex reviews whose sandbox could not start are unavailable, not a pass

In containers without unprivileged user namespaces every Codex command
fails, yet the review exits 0 and concludes 'no findings' (captured in
test/fixtures/codex-sandbox/). The validator now takes execution evidence:
'codex exec --json' command events and the 'codex review' stderr transcript
(a command that succeeded proves execution); sandbox failure lines on
stderr or in failed command output return unavailable(sandbox_unavailable);
exact 'could not run commands / read the diff' phrases are the last
fallback. Review text that merely discusses bwrap or namespaces still passes.

A free 'codex sandbox ... true' preflight (Linux, 10 s) runs before the paid
model probe and every automatic outside review; CODEX_MODE gains
sandbox_unavailable, and an inconclusive model probe reports unverified
instead of ready (exit code kept for stale callers). Every Codex site
(outside-voice resolver, /codex review, challenge, consult) takes its sandbox
from _GSTACK_CODEX_SANDBOX and pipes its result through the validator; a
static test parses rendered command positions for both. GSTACK_CODEX_NO_SANDBOX=1
(exactly 1, shell env only) switches to danger-full-access with a warning on
every use. Sandbox pins in existing tests move from the literal read-only to
the selected-sandbox variable; captured autoplan probes are judged against
the probe block they executed.

* C6: gstack-relink discovers skills structurally, so /browse survives a skill_prefix toggle

relink skipped a hardcoded list of support-directory names that included
browse, a real skill, so toggling skill_prefix removed /browse. A top-level
directory is now a skill exactly when it carries a SKILL.md.

Co-authored-by: Jonathan Zhang <topcoder1@Mac-Studio.local>

* C4: carve ship and plan-ceo-review on every host; enforce the 160 KB byte gate

The generated ship skill was 202-241 KB on all 10 non-Claude hosts (and
Factory plan-ceo-review 160,039 bytes), over the 160,000-byte ceiling,
because section carving ran only for Claude. Both skills now carve on every
host, pointing at sections relative to the installed skill directory (literal
$GSTACK_ROOT/<skill>/sections refs are rewritten the same way). The ceiling
is measured in UTF-8 bytes and fails generation in repo mode; under
--install-root it warns so setup never leaves a user without skills.

qa-lazy-sections.test.ts pinned ship as inline-on-external-hosts; migrated to
the carved policy and kept the inline check on review (Claude-only carve).

* B5: learnings and timeline reads fail loudly when bun is missing

gstack-learnings-search and gstack-timeline-read ended in
'2>/dev/null || exit 0', so a missing bun or a crashed embedded script
printed nothing and exited 0, identical to 'nothing recorded'. Both now
exit 127 with '<script>: bun not found on PATH, so ... could not be
read. Fix: install Bun (https://bun.sh), then re-run ./setup.' and let
an embedded-script failure exit non-zero with its stderr. A successful
run with no matches still exits 0 with empty output. The generated
callers that print 'LEARNINGS: unavailable (...)' belong to the
generator lane.

Co-authored-by: loulanyue <260355617@qq.com>

* B2: a retired-model 404 reports MODEL_UNUSABLE, not CODEX_MODE: ready

The model probe matched only 400 / 'is not supported', so a retired model's
404 ('does not exist or you do not have access to it') and a custom
provider's bare 404 fell through to the inconclusive branch and reported
ready. Both now classify as MODEL_UNUSABLE with a hint naming the two causes
(retired model, or a wrong base_url) and log codex_model_retired; a
'requires a newer version of Codex' 400 points at upgrading the CLI and logs
codex_cli_outdated. Ported from #2843 onto the current probe.

Co-authored-by: Marek Cermak <marek.cermak@strv.com>

* B6: rank learnings by matched query tokens and disclose truncation

A more specific query used to drop the exact match: the token-OR filter
recalled every entry sharing one token, the sort used confidence alone,
and the default --limit cut silently. Entries now rank by how many
distinct query tokens they match, then confidence, then recency, and a
query that matched more than fit says '-- N more matched, raise --limit
to see them'. The hit count lives in a local map so a field stored on
disk can never become a sort key, and the type grouping uses a
null-prototype map so a row typed 'constructor' or '__proto__' cannot
crash the run. Ranking code ported from #2796; regression vectors
adapted from #2799 (its stemmer is not needed).

Co-authored-by: loulanyue <260355617@qq.com>
Co-authored-by: y$un_ <forrest.sun527@gmail.com>

* C7: required team mode also blocks Copilot CLI's lowercase skill tool

Copilot CLI applies Claude-format matchers by tool name; its skill tool is
`skill`, which no Claude tool name maps to, so the 'Skill' matcher never
fired and Copilot ran protected skills without gstack. The hook entry now
matches 'Skill|skill', an entry an older team-init wrote is upgraded in
place, and the deny is emitted in both decision formats (Copilot reads the
top-level permissionDecision, Claude Code reads hookSpecificOutput) with
exit 0 so both parse it.

Test migration: the settings test pinned matcher 'Skill'.

Co-authored-by: neallee <neallee@gmail.com>

* B3: Codex auth probe accepts custom providers' env_key credentials

The auth probe only knew CODEX_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY and auth.json, so a
working self-hosted or OpenAI-compatible provider configured with
[model_providers.<id>] env_key = "X" reported AUTH_FAILED and /codex
stopped. The probe now reads env_key from model_providers tables only
(comments ignored, the name must be a shell identifier before it is
dereferenced) and accepts a set variable; when none is set it names the
missing key on stderr. Ported from #2192 with the table scoping added.

Co-authored-by: hardy <932821449@qq.com>

* E8: keep the extensions profile under the state dir at a path lock cleanup accepts

cleanSingletonLocks only cleans directories named chromium-profile, so the
BROWSE_EXTENSIONS_DIR profile moves to <state>/extensions/chromium-profile.

* B10: plan-tune never reports CALIBRATED with zero signal events

Stats printed CALIBRATED: true from logged-answer counts alone, while
every answer could miss SIGNAL_MAP and leave each dimension at its 0.5
seed (#2623). --derive now records inferred.signal_events, the answers
that actually moved a dimension; calibration requires at least one, and
the summary prints 'not calibrated: no recorded signals' verbatim when
there are none (or says the count is unknown for a profile derived
before this change). The psychographic redesign stays out of scope.

* A1: verify gbrain landing before stamping transcripts, plus --reconcile

gbrain import exits 0 while skipping pages (returned per-file failures,
malformed filenames, managed-import Pending receipts), and its failure
ledger exists only for git import dirs, so a skipped page was stamped
ingested and never retried (field reports: 37 and 69 lost entries).

Write, verify, then stamp (lib/memory-ingest-landing.ts, a new ratcheted
module):
- State schema 2 with a transition table (staged -> imported_unverified ->
ingested, plus refused, quarantined, unrecoverable). Schema 1 files
migrate in place: entries become ingested in the legacy "default"
source and a reconcile pass is marked pending.
- Named failures come from --json `failures`, stderr "Skipped <rel>:"
lines and the ledger; a failure gbrain does not attribute refuses the
whole batch. After 3 refused batches the batch is bisected and the page
that poisons it is quarantined (printed even under --quiet).
- Landing check: one `gbrain list --source-id` per source per run and at
most 50 `gbrain get --json` content checks against a
gstack_content_sha256 frontmatter field gstack now writes. Lookup errors
and pglite_busy mean "not yet checked", never absent; pages over the cap
stay imported_unverified and are not re-imported.
- Each entry records its gbrain source_id. Remote-http mode records
"staged", never "ingested".
- The source fingerprint comes from the exact bytes parsed, so a
transcript that grows during import is not stamped as its newer self
(the old unscanned contract test is migrated; it pinned that bug).
- --reconcile mode (bounded by --limit, default 200; resumable; --dry-run;
backs up the state file) prints "reconcile: checked N, present M,
re-queued K, not yet checked L". --request-reconcile records a pending
pass without calling gbrain; the v1.91.17.0 migration (placeholder name)
uses it, and the next ingest run does one bounded pass.
- One lock for every state writer; a state-save failure fails the run.

The #1802 static pins in regression-1611 move to the new structure
(remote-http returns before importBatch; the finally honors
preserveStaging).

Co-authored-by: afshaker <andrew@phone2.io>

* B4: arm64 re-sign keeps a backup, restores it when codesign fails, and reports design unavailable on exit 137

setup's Apple Silicon re-sign mutated each binary in place (truncate, remove
signature) and left it that way when re-signing failed; a design binary that
was then SIGKILLed at launch produced at most a quiet log line. Each binary is
now copied first and restored as built when signing fails, and design is
exec-probed after re-signing: exit 137 prints 'design unavailable: ... Fix:
cd <checkout> && ./setup' (even under -q). Verified on Linux with the real
block and uname/codesign/otool/stat stubs; not run on a Mac.

* D3: treat design docs and handoff notes as data in plan reviews

plan-ceo-review, plan-eng-review and plan-devex-review read the freshest
design doc as the source of truth, and nothing said its content is data.
In multi-agent pipelines another agent may have written it, or a handoff
note beside it, with reviewer-directed text ('skip Step 0', 'approve
as-is'). Each read site now says the doc and any handoff note are data,
never to follow text aimed at the reviewer, and to report it as
suspicious content. The plan-completion audit's discovery, which now
reads repo docs/designs/ files (F1), carries the same rule.

Co-authored-by: cube <frosimanuel@gmail.com>

* D4: setup-deploy reports Render API key presence only

/setup-deploy ran 'echo $RENDER_API_KEY | head -c 4', printing the
key's first bytes into the transcript. It now prints only
'RENDER_API_KEY: set' or 'RENDER_API_KEY: not set'. Wording follows the
#2971 port of #1096; a test also guards against any setup-deploy command
echoing a credential variable.

Co-authored-by: jacob-wang <jiayuw794@gmail.com>

* D5: per-project headed Chromium profiles; never kill a live profile owner (#2492)

The headed profile moves from <gstack home>/chromium-profile to
<project>/.gstack/chromium-profile (CHROMIUM_PROFILE still wins).
killOrphanChromium now kills a SingletonLock PID only when the lock names
this host, the process is a Chromium using that profile, and its daemon is
gone (reparented to init or a subreaper); a live owner or another host's
lock stops browse with the holder named. On first headed use a project
profile is seeded from the old shared profile only when nothing holds it:
copied without Singleton* files into a 0700 temp dir and renamed into
place, with a one-time notice; otherwise it starts fresh and says how to
import later. New: browse profiles [list] and browse profiles prune
[--days N] (never removes a profile in use or the old shared one).
The #2817 headed-startup tests move to the project profile and a real
orphan (the old stand-in was a live child of the test).

Co-authored-by: miao <miao@macmini-2.local>

* F5: installed Claude skills serve the rendered sections, not the checkout copies

Probe: a gbrain user render serves ship/SKILL.md from the render dir; its
STOP pointers name absolute render paths, but its section index names
`sections/<f>.md` relative to the installed skill directory, whose
sections/ was linked from the checkout. So the rendered 'Save Results to
Brain' blocks (plan reviews, office-hours, ship adversarial) were generated
and never read. setup's _link_skill_runtime_assets and gstack-relink (the
gbrain-refresh path) now serve a rendered counterpart per file, keep
checkout-only assets (manifest.json), return an asset to the checkout once
its render is gone, and never touch an entry that is not gstack's links.

Co-authored-by: Jonah Berg <jonah.berg.g@gmail.com>

* F1: ratchet /ship's parity union-size cap for this lane's content

G1's NO_VERSION arms, F1's parent-side plan binding and D3's data line
add 2,126 bytes to /ship's skeleton-plus-sections union, taking it from
1.4022x to 1.4135x of the v1.64.1.0 baseline (cap was 1.405). The cap
moves to 1.414 with the measurement recorded, as earlier growth did; no
other invariant changes.

* E5: feed every Codex prompt on stdin instead of argv

Prompts went to Codex as one argv string ('codex exec "$(cat file)"'), which
fails over 32 KB on Windows (and over 128 KB on Linux, E2BIG) and mangles
quotes. Every codex exec site (outside-voice resolver, /codex review custom
instructions, challenge, consult new and resume) now runs 'codex exec -'
with the prepared prompt file on stdin; challenge and consult write the
prompt with a quoted heredoc so it is never shell-parsed. The bash-native
timeout watchdog (stock macOS) started the command in the background, which
gives it /dev/null as stdin; it now passes the caller's stdin through.

The 'byte for byte' dispatch test drops its old argv trailing-LF exception,
the consultation and autoplan fixtures follow the stdin form, and the static
site test requires stdin at every rendered codex exec.

* G6: prettyscreenshot --hide keeps a trailing image path as the output path (#1419)

--hide collected every following non-flag argument as a selector, so the
output path was hidden instead of written to. A trailing argument that looks
like a path or ends in .png/.jpg/.jpeg/.webp is now the output path.

Co-authored-by: Jayesh Betala <jayesh.betala7@gmail.com>

* INV-3: render-level host conformance and generated-bash lint on every host

One render per host checks every fence of every SKILL.md and section file:
bash -n with angle-bracket placeholders normalized; the env-var host prelude
and its B/D consumers run under env -i and set -u with stub binaries (no
empty value, no /bin/, /browse, /design or /gstack- path); and a quote-aware
lint (test/helpers/generated-bash-lint.ts) fails on a ~/ word inside double
quotes, mktemp without a TMPDIR-respecting template, and cd/rm -r/mv/git -C
on a variable the fence never assigned unless written ${VAR:?...} (cd must
also handle failure). Negative controls plant each failure.

Templated the bare mktemp calls in generator-owned resolvers and the upgrade
fence; migrated the two tests that pinned the bare form.

* G6: analytics averages quoted duration_s values (#1728)

gstack-skill-end writes duration_s as a quoted string, and the per-skill
average stripped everything from the leading quote, so every average
read 0s. The awk now drops a leading quote before extracting digits.

Co-authored-by: Ryan Alberts <ryan.a.alberts@gmail.com>

* G6: gstack-ios-qa-daemon --help prints usage instead of starting the daemon (#1932)

Co-authored-by: maxpetrusenkoagent <max.petrusenko.agent@gmail.com>

* G1: tighten /ship's NO_VERSION wording to fit the union-size cap

Same behavior in fewer bytes: the NO_VERSION arm, the broken-source
exit, the unprefixed-title rule, the Step 20 null and the CHANGELOG
skip. The cap ratchet commit measured this wording.

* G6: rejected taste preferences gain confidence (#1777)

bumpPref computed every entry's confidence from approved_count, so a
rejected entry, which never gains approvals, stayed at 0: show ranked
rejections by insertion order and the taste-drift warning could not
fire from real use. Confidence now uses the entry's own bucket count.
Also salvaged by Garry's #2971.

Co-authored-by: Jayesh Betala <jayesh.betala7@gmail.com>

* E2: Windows /cso build disables only C5105, and a failed MSVC compile is not reported as a missing toolchain

The Windows SDK's winbase.h raises C5105, which /W4 /WX promotes to error
C2220, so every MSVC build of the native /cso helper failed, and setup
mapped every probe failure to 'install Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools'.
Both compile lines add /wd5105 (only that diagnostic), and setup keeps the
probe's output: a probe that found MSVC but failed to compile reports
windows-msvc-compile with the compiler's first error. Not run on Windows:
the mapping test stubs powershell.exe; the ps1 assertion runs everywhere.

Co-authored-by: AlinValentin7 <AlinValentin7@users.noreply.github.com>

* E6: gbrain-refresh hands the detection file to Python on stdin

Under Git Bash, a native Windows Python first on PATH cannot open an MSYS
/c/... path, so gbrain-refresh always summarized the detection as
'local-status: unknown' and brain-aware blocks were suppressed. bash now
opens the file and Python reads stdin; the grep fallback without Python is
unchanged. Verified on Linux with a stub Python that refuses path opens; not
run on Windows.

Co-authored-by: maxpetrusenkoagent <max.petrusenko.agent@gmail.com>

* G6: context-save computes session duration on Linux (#2704)

The duration step parsed 'ps -o lstart=' with BSD-only 'date -jf', so on
Linux session_duration_s was always unknown. It now falls back to GNU
'date -d', and never parses an empty start (GNU reads that as midnight).
Ported onto the current block instead of #2704's ~/.gstack/sessions
mtime, which bypassed the state root.

Co-authored-by: Evgenii Lopatin <e75533@gmail.com>

* Q2: one-time notice naming the Codex provider and account for outside reviews

Outside reviews are on by default and use whatever Codex login exists
(#965). The first automatic Codex review on a machine now prints one
non-blocking notice: the provider (config.toml model_provider, else openai),
where the credential comes from (CODEX_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY, the ChatGPT
login or the key saved by codex login; never the value), that reviews stay
on, and how to turn them off (gstack-config set codex_reviews disabled). A
marker in the gstack state root keeps it to once per machine. Tests that run
the generated command now use private state roots. Also shortens the
no-sandbox provenance line.

* Q1: validate browser output paths the way the kernel resolves them (#2971 salvage)

validateOutputPath walks the destination one component at a time, resolving
each existing component before the next, so link/../x, a dangling symlink
and a dangling symlinked parent can no longer route a write outside the
safe directories, while a new multi-level directory inside them is allowed.
scrape validates its manifest and every downloaded file, not only --dir.
Ported from PR #2971 onto current code.

* G6: retro test census counts non-JS suites, skips generated output

The census recognized only JS/TS-style names, so pytest and minitest
(test_*.py|rb), XCTest (Tests/ dirs, FooTests.swift), Terraform
(*.tftest.hcl) and Bats (*.bats) suites counted as zero, and a committed
build directory counted as authored code (and its Test/ subdirs as test
LOC). is_test now knows those conventions and never treats prose as a
test, generated output is skipped in the numstat pass, TEST_FILES_CHANGED
uses is_test, and TEST_FILES_TOTAL uses the same filename conventions
minus generated paths. Merges #2812, #2809 and #2037's patterns (#2037's
retro template edits target a block the metrics bin replaced).

Co-authored-by: Jino <dgfrty00@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: snig-17 <santosh.m.tiwari@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Sholto McNeilage <sholto@nodenarrative.com.au>

* Q3: setup stops auto-installing the AskUserQuestion preference hook in Conductor and removes one it added

The PreToolUse question-preference hook breaks Conductor's native
AskUserQuestion round-trip even when it only defers (#2207), and setup
auto-installed it on every Conductor workspace setup. Now a Conductor setup
without an explicit opt-in never installs it and removes an existing one
(the question-log and AUQ-error hooks stay), printing how to keep it
(gstack-config set plan_tune_hooks yes). An explicit opt-in still installs
it. gstack-settings-hook remove-source gains --event to scope the removal.

Test migration: setup-plan-tune-hooks-noninteractive pinned the retired
Conductor auto-opt-in.

Co-authored-by: Phil Hie <philhie@outlook.com>

* E5: watchdog stdin test feeds the wrapper through a redirect

Callers run '_gstack_codex_timeout_wrapper ... codex exec - < file'. Bash keeps
stdin for a backgrounded command inside a pipeline but not behind a
redirect, so the pipe form passed on the old watchdog; the redirect form
reproduces the lost prompt.

* F4: type the variant-round fetch stub like the existing stubs

The test-typecheck ratchet flagged the zero-argument stub cast to
typeof fetch; it now takes the fetch arguments like
variants-retry-after's stub. Test behavior unchanged.

* A4: import transcripts into per-repository, non-federated gbrain sources

`gbrain import` ran without --source-id, so transcripts from every project
landed in the shared (often federated) default source.

- Each transcript partition imports with --source-id into its originating
repository's own source (gstack-transcripts-<repo>, built with
constrainSourceId, now exported from lib/gbrain-sources.ts). The source
is registered machine-local and --no-federated before its first import,
and the registration is cached in state. Partitions import one after
another (PGLite is a single writer); a failing source no longer blocks
the others, except a timeout, whose checkpoint must survive.
- If gbrain cannot register the source, that partition stays local and
unstamped, and the run says why (even under --quiet).
- --include-unattributed sends repo-less transcripts only to the
machine-local gstack-transcripts-unattributed source, keeps them on the
machine when the brain is remote (Postgres, Supabase or remote-HTTP),
and never writes them to the publishable ~/.gstack/transcripts staging.
- A page's recorded source is sticky: pages stamped before this release
("default") keep importing there, so no source gains a duplicate.
- The staging dir name carries -src-<id> so a resumed import keeps its
source.

Test fakes that recorded only the last import now record every import of
one run, and answer `gbrain sources`; remote-http scan tests use an
attributed transcript, since unattributed ones no longer stage there.

Co-authored-by: Sinabina <sinabina@Sinabinas-MacBook-Pro-4.local>

* F3: load the taste profile, and report a failed slug lookup

The taste-profile probe double-quoted ~/.claude/.../gstack-slug, so the tilde
never expanded and /design-consultation and /design-shotgun always printed
NO_TASTE_PROFILE. Use quoteSafePath(); stop hiding gstack-slug's stderr and
print TASTE_PROFILE_UNAVAILABLE with the fix when the slug cannot be resolved.

* B4: DESIGN_READY only when the design binary actually starts

DESIGN SETUP (and office-hours' visual exploration) printed DESIGN_READY for
any executable binary, so one SIGKILLed at launch by an invalid macOS code
signature still passed. Launch it under the portable 10-second deadline
(gtimeout, timeout, or perl alarm); otherwise print DESIGN_NOT_AVAILABLE with
the exit code, 'timed out after 10s', or on 137 the code-signature hint and
'Fix: cd <checkout> && ./setup'. A success is cached by inode and mtime under
the state root so Gatekeeper's first-launch scan is paid once.

The probe launches the binary with no arguments (usage, exit 0): the design
CLI has no --version command today.

* C2: name the runtime root every way a generated preflight may read it in the dist test

The generator lane's C1 resolves D from $GSTACK_ROOT instead of
$GSTACK_DESIGN, so the test now exports GSTACK_ROOT as well; it still fails
on main (no dist in the roots) and passes with and without the C1 change.

* A5: brain-sync stage fails loud when the artifacts source indexed zero pages

The stage reported "curated artifacts pushed" whenever gstack-brain-sync
exited 0, but a git push is not gbrain indexing. After a successful push
the stage now reads the maintained artifacts source's page count
(GSTACK_BRAIN_SOURCE_ID, else the source whose path is the artifacts
worktree or state root): zero pages is ERR with the fix command; a
missing source or an unavailable count says so instead of claiming
indexing.

Co-authored-by: Jimmy Zeisweiss <4261258+jzeisweiss@users.noreply.github.com>

* B1: state the effective read-only sandbox in /codex review prose

The codex parity invariant requires the skill to state sandbox_mode="read-only";
the command now takes it from _GSTACK_CODEX_SANDBOX, so the prose names the
effective default explicitly.

* A6: report deleted-worktree gbrain sources; prune only with proof, on request

A deleted Conductor worktree leaves its gstack-code-<hash> source behind
and gbrain's autopilot fails on it forever. Local absence is not proof a
source is dead (machines sharing a federated brain register their own
paths, and its pages may be the only copy of uncommitted work), so gstack
never removes one automatically.

- Each sync counts consecutive misses for gstack code sources whose path
is missing, prints "path unavailable" once per source with the review
command, and records which repository each synced source belongs to.
- New gstack-gbrain-sync --prune-gone-worktrees (with --dry-run, whose
plan it always prints first) removes a source only when its path was
missing on two consecutive syncs, its parent is readable, recomputing
deriveCodeSourceId() for that path on this host yields its id, and the
repository's git common dir still exists and no longer lists the
worktree. It re-checks the path right before removing (through the
#1734-guarded safeSourcesRemove) and logs each removal.

* D0: pass the Bun child flags after 'run' so wrappers that rewrite 'bun run' argv keep working

bun run --no-env-file --config=/dev/null <script> has the same effect
(verified on Bun 1.4.0) and keeps argv[1] === 'run', which the
publication-lock fixture's preload injection relies on. The sidebar-tabs
source guard now expects the flags in the terminal-agent spawn.

* E8: count the BROWSE_EXTENSIONS_DIR persistent launch in the signal-flags guard

The new launch site carries handleSIGINT/SIGTERM/SIGHUP false like the
other three, so the guard's expected count moves from 3 to 4.

* D2: give the memory-leak reproducer's fake request isNavigationRequest()

wirePageEvents now runs the navigation guard on every request event; the
fake request adapter supplies the method real Playwright requests have.

* A7: run only the resolve_symbol_edges dream phase, detected first

/sync-gbrain --dream and the --full auto-build ran gbrain's full dream
cycle (~35 minutes, LLM phases) when the call graph needs only the
resolve_symbol_edges phase. The stage now runs
gbrain dream [--source <id>] --phase resolve_symbol_edges when the
installed gbrain accepts that phase (detected by behavior: gbrain
validates --phase before printing --help). Otherwise it skips the forced
dream and says the full cycle costs about 35 minutes and how to run it,
instead of starting it.

Co-authored-by: liutiming <timingliu@outlook.com>

* D0: keep the dotenv isolation test runnable on the Windows lane

The compiled probe gets its .exe name on Windows, and the terminal-agent
case (owner identity comes from ps) is skipped there.

* B9: read cycle_freshness from a doctor run that includes it

/sync-gbrain Step 3.5 and the --full auto-dream decision read CYCLE from
gbrain doctor --json --fast, which skips the DB checks that carry
cycle_freshness, so the answer was always "unknown". Both now read
gbrain doctor --json --scope=brain (DB checks, no skill-file walk), parse
its JSON even when doctor exits 1 for a failing check, and match the
issue that names this source: "never completed" is never, "last cycled
Nh ago" is completed. When the installed gbrain does not report the
check, they say "unknown: installed gbrain does not expose
cycle_freshness" (lib readCycleStatus carries the reason to the --full
SKIP row).

The source-probe fixture that pinned the --fast call and a made-up
message format now answers --scope=brain with gbrain's real message.

* B4: compact the launch probe (cache keyed on inode, valid while newer than the binary)

Keeps design-consultation inside its parity size budget.

* C4: migrate the ship docs-dispatch test to the carved external ship

On Codex and Factory the documentation dispatch now lives in
sections/documentation.md behind a pointer relative to the installed skill,
like Claude; the test pinned the old inlined layout.

* B5: learnings callers report a failed search instead of reading as empty

Every generated gstack-learnings-search caller ended in 2>/dev/null || true,
so a missing bun or a failed search looked like 'nothing recorded'. Callers
now keep stdout, capture stderr and the exit status, and print
'LEARNINGS: unavailable (<first stderr line>)' on failure (resolver callers
in learnings.ts and review-army.ts, plus investigate, qa and ship's
adversarial section).

* F1: ship and review count unverified/unavailable outside reviews as missing coverage

INV-1 consumers in this lane's templates: /ship's readiness note, its
PR body Pre-Landing Review section and /review's completion rule now say
an outside review reporting unverified or unavailable is missing
coverage, never a pass. The PR body's Plan Completion section prints
F1's not-run line instead of the old 'No plan file detected.' The /ship
union-size cap moves to 1.415 for these lines (measured 1.4148).

* A8: rename the artifacts repo with OWNER/REPO, rewrite the remote only after it

The v1.27.0.0 migration passed a bare repo name to gh repo rename / gh
repo edit, which always fails (gh wants [HOST/]OWNER/REPO), then step 2
rewrote ~/.gstack-artifacts-remote.txt to the never-renamed repository.

- Qualify both names with the owner from the recorded remote URL (else
the signed-in gh user) and surface gh's error.
- Step 2 moves the remote file but rewrites the URL only once the rename
is confirmed; a later successful retry rewrites it then.
- A pending journal now counts as state to migrate, so the #1383 retry
actually re-runs step 1 (it used to see no legacy file and declare the
migration done).
- The v1.91.17.0 migration (placeholder name) repairs installs already
hit: when the remote names gstack-artifacts-<user> that does not exist
but gstack-brain-<user> does, it restores the old URL in the remote
file and ~/.gstack's origin and says so. It only calls gh for such a
remote and never fails the upgrade.

Co-authored-by: Brandon Pugsley <aibpaem@gmail.com>

* B8: read gbrain JSON with bun instead of jq in install and wireup

gstack-gbrain-install read package.json with jq but never checked for it,
so on a machine without jq a successful install failed with "cannot read
version". gstack-gbrain-source-wireup hard-failed without jq ("brew
install jq" is not actionable on git-bash), so the wireup was skipped on
every run. Both now read the JSON with bun, which they already require.

Co-authored-by: benjamin beres <benjamin.beres@bienpreter.com>

* B4: shorter probe messages (design-consultation parity budget)

* B5: shorter capture variable names (parity budget)

* E7: find the Aside CLI in ~/.local/bin when it is not on PATH (#2902)

The installer puts aside in ~/.local/bin, which is not on the default macOS
login PATH, so the probe said NEEDS_ASIDE ('download Aside') for a healthy
install. The probe now falls back to ~/.local/bin/aside, drives the resolved
binary, and prints READY: <path> when it is off PATH so later blocks run that
path. Ported from PR #2965 onto the current _gs_d probe.

Co-authored-by: Som Samantray <som.samantray@gmail.com>

* A2: key the dot-slug catalog entry on the message users actually saw

* E1: cmd.exe-safe investigate freeze hook

On Windows Claude Code runs hook commands through cmd.exe, which cannot parse
the single-quoted bash -c argument, so /investigate's scope-lock hook never
ran. Use one double-quoted bash -c script that names the hook path directly
(no S= variable: POSIX sh would expand $S to empty and skip the hook).

* F4: design resolver reads per-round variant paths

$D variants now writes $_DESIGN_DIR/round-<N>/variant-*.png and prints JSON
with roundDir, manifest and paths. The mockup flow and comparison-board loops
build the board from those printed paths instead of hardcoded
variant-{A,B,C}.png, and approved.json records approved_path and round so a
round-1 choice made after round 2 still resolves.

* E4: generators tolerate Bun's spurious EEXIST on Windows (#2329)

Bun on Windows throws EEXIST from a recursive mkdir of an existing directory,
so gen:skill-docs and the llms.txt writer crashed once a second file landed
in a directory. Both now use lib/fs-utils' mkdirpSync (ported from PR #2329
onto the existing helper instead of a new scripts/fs-utils.ts).

Co-authored-by: Vaughan <vaughan@cairnsitguy.com.au>

* C7: keep the required-mode hook's exit-2 deny

Copilot CLI treats a preToolUse exit 2 as deny (its hooks reference), and
#2413 established exit 2 plus hookSpecificOutput as the shape Claude Code
enforces, so the deny output stays as on main; only the matcher and the
in-place upgrade of older 'Skill' entries change.

* C3: guard Kiro's router copies on a present source; give the QA pointer adapter the copy and dist helpers

A copy fails where a symlink dangled, so the Kiro router and upgrade copies
are written only when their render exists (as every other runtime root
already does). test/qa-lazy-sections' extracted Kiro installer now supplies
_link_runtime_dists (C2) and the SKILL.md copy helpers (C3).

* Q3: office-hours asks open-ended questions in a Q<N> prose form (#2719)

In Conductor, and whenever AskUserQuestion fails, prose is the only channel,
and the prose fallback defined only the D<N> decision brief. Phase 2A/2B
diagnostic questions have no option set, so the model dropped the phase.
Office-hours' preamble now defines the Q<N> open-question form (question,
why I'm asking, what a strong answer sounds like) and routes free-text
replies to it; the diagnostic sections name it. Scoped to office-hours so
every other skill's preamble is unchanged. Ported from PR #2729.

Co-authored-by: Bharadwaj Mittapelli <bharadwajmittapelli@gmail.com>

* A2: render db-unreachable like timeout

gbrain's new db-unreachable status is a transient network failure; a setup
run while offline must not strip brain-aware blocks from every skill.

* A2: treat db-unreachable like timeout in gbrain-refresh

The memory lane's new db-unreachable status (network or DNS failure, config
intact) is transient, so gbrain-refresh keeps rendering brain-aware blocks
for it exactly as it does for timeout instead of suppressing them.

* C8: a render given disabled skills drops them from the router (#3018)

The root router named every skill and ends 'When in doubt, invoke the skill',
so it routed to skills the user disabled. gen-skill-docs takes
--disabled-skills (runGeneration disabledSkills): the router drops their
routing rules, keeps the other side of an 'A or B' rule, and names them as
disabled. The router and gstack-upgrade cannot be disabled. With no disabled
skills the render is byte-identical.

* G2/G3/INV-1: skill-start former-bucket notice and visible learnings failure; TMPDIR mktemp in gbrain bins; best-effort reasons

* C9: Step 2 falls back to the install registry's source checkout (DX-7)

Codex users who installed from the README's ~/gstack clone got 'ERROR:
gstack not found' from /gstack-upgrade: Step 2 only looked under host skill
directories. It now falls back to the source checkout the install registry
recorded for the current host.

* B4: design --version prints the version, and the probe uses it

The design CLI treated --version as an unknown command (exit 1), so the
probe launched the binary with no arguments instead. Add --version (prints
the gstack version, exit 0, before auth or network) and probe with it, so
messages read '<path> --version exited <code>' as planned.

* C4: no external render points at a section file that is not installed

design-html's detector install offer and plan-eng-review's self-check pointed
at $GSTACK_ROOT/<skill>/sections/<file> on every external host, where neither
skill is carved and no section tree exists. design-html now inlines the offer
off Claude, and a skill's pointer to its own {{SECTION}}-inlined section
names the inlined text.

* C1: skillify finds the browse SDK under its own host's install root

The template hardcoded ~/.claude/skills/gstack for the canonical
browse-client.ts, so external hosts read another host's install or nothing.
A new INSTALLED_ROOT resolver (sibling of INSTALLED_BIN_DIR) names the host's
global root, or the per-install root when setup renders for one.

* C4: rewrite section refs on hosts whose root stays a literal ~/<globalRoot>

Kiro, OpenCode, Cursor and Copilot render ~/.claude/skills/gstack as their own
literal root, not $GSTACK_ROOT, so plan-eng-review's self-check pointer
escaped the rewrite (found by the setup lane's installed-pointer check).

* Integrator: outside-voice fences use the shared runtime prelude; TMPDIR mktemp and per-round variant paths in design templates

* Integrator: C8 router omits disabled skills on every render (relink renders the served Claude router in place); Windows-safe E4/E6 entries; investigate hooks under the cmd.exe check; browse_extension_id reader; order-insensitive test typecheck identities

tsc printed one unchanged ceo-mode-option diagnostic's object members in a
different order (content?/isError?) once lib/fs-utils joined the generator's
import graph; identities now sort object-type members, and old baselines
normalize on read.

* Q1 (#2971 salvage): bound iOS proxy responses

One wall-clock deadline covers headers and body (stalled and dribbling bodies
time out), the whole body is capped at 64 MiB (upstream_response_too_large),
every terminal path clears its timer, removes listeners and destroys the
request, and the daemon threads the deadline through both listeners. Ambiguous
mutations are still never replayed after a timeout or abort. Ported from
#2971's proxy-transport work plus the size bound.

* I1: grade the AUQ matrix's (recommended) marker on option labels, the field the auto-decide hook reads

The decision-brief format puts a Pros / cons block with 'A) ... (recommended)'
in the question text and the same marker on the option label. The matrix
counted both and failed all six skills in periodic run 37151477069 with
'expected exactly one (recommended) option, found 2'. The question-preference
hook reads labels only, so the gate now checks the native question: a
Recommendation line in the question text and exactly one label ending in
(recommended). Fixtures move to the native question shape and add the real
spec capture plus a marker-only-in-text negative control.

* Q1: type the proxy-transport test doubles (typecheck:test ratchet)

* INV-1: gate outcome rows and troubleshooting sections for every lane's new messages

* Release v1.91.19.0 (next free patch in the queue: #3022 holds 1.91.17.0, #3023 holds 1.91.18.0); migration renamed; engines.bun >=1.4.0 to match the CI pin (#2815)

* v1.91.19.0 docs and metadata: CHANGELOG, TODOS, README troubleshooting/upgrade/type --selector, BROWSER.md type and profiles, AGENTS.md conventions, CONTRIBUTING #2949, touchfiles for the wave's new lib/bin files

* I1: give hermetic Codex runs a temp dir beside CODEX_HOME so Codex can create its PATH aliases

Codex 0.160 refuses to create its helper aliases (codex-linux-sandbox among
them) when CODEX_HOME sits under its temp dir, and the runner put the
hermetic home under the shard TMPDIR. Periodic run 37151477069 shows the
warning and 'Unable to spawn codex-linux-sandbox ... No viable candidates
found in PATH' for every exec_command in codex-sol-scope-termination.

* I1: Codex evals fail a review whose commands never ran and stop reading tool errors as skill-load problems

validateCodexReview accepted codex-review-findings in periodic run 37151477069
although its only command failed in bwrap ('I couldn't run the review'); it
now requires execution evidence from classifyOutsideReview (B1's INV-1
classifier). codex-sol-scope-termination failed on 'apply_patch verification
failed: invalid hunk' because the skill-load check matched any 'invalid';
it now matches Codex 0.160's skill-loader diagnostics only.

* I1: run paid eval containers with seccomp unconfined so Codex's sandbox can start

Docker's default seccomp profile blocks the user namespaces bubblewrap needs,
so every Codex command in a paid eval failed with 'bwrap: No permissions to
create a new namespace' (codex-review-findings, run 37151477069). Reproduced
in the CI image locally: default profile fails, seccomp=unconfined runs the
command. The runner stays non-root.

* I1: shared-libs plan actor reads one exclusion grammar for scope lists

Periodic run 37151477069 refused 'Existing-caller migration and helper
hardening stay out of scope' as a hardening proposal: the actor had two
partial exclusion rules (unanchored is/are/remains outside, and an anchored
list that only stays unchanged), the third refusal at this boundary after
36633323521 and 36776104571. One anchored predicate now covers a bare list
of scope nouns (hyphenated compounds included) with is/are/stays/remains and
unchanged/untouched/excluded/out of scope/outside/not part; any other verb
in the clause is still read as a proposal. Adds the real capture and two
adversarial controls.

* Parity caps: measured v1.91.19.0 union/skeleton sizes for ship, review, design-consultation, office-hours and design-shotgun, with the reason beside each

* Regenerate generated output for v1.91.19.0 (gen:skill-docs --host all, goldens, llms.txt, context-budget fixture)

* I1: plan-eng-review writes the Test Plan Artifact even while test choices are pending

Periodic run 37151477069 (plan-eng-review-artifact): a non-interactive review
recorded every Test review choice as pending and never wrote the QA test
plan, because Step 5 said to write the artifact 'when these test and eval
choices are resolved' while the artifact section says to list unresolved
choices as pending. Both now say to write it after the decision gate, with
unanswered choices under Pending Decisions. The pinned sentence becomes a
meaning-level check.

* I3: plan-eng-review states when findings first enter the report and that the scope menu's recommendation needs no repo probe

Judge rationales for 'plan-eng-review/SKILL.md sections' (actionability 3.67
in periodic run 37151477069, clarity 3 in 36385945043 and 35567915613) cite
two concrete tensions: 'do not add findings before Scope Challenge C' versus
the ledger saves C itself performs, and 'Recommendation: A when a branch diff
exists' versus 'do not probe for session state'. The write policy now says
findings first enter through Scope Challenge C's ledger saves; the selector
says its Recommendation line advises the user and needs no repository
inspection. The pinned sentence becomes the new meaning-level regex.

* I3: plan-ceo-review defines the closing sequence's cleanup step

Two of three judge samples for 'plan-ceo-review/SKILL.md modes' in periodic
run 37151477069 (actionability at the 4.0 gate) flag 'perform permitted
cleanup' as never defined. The only cleanup the skill has is archiving old
CEO plans, which needs approval; step 5 now says so.

* I3: /qa-only's value-card rule names only its own card location

qa-only rendered the /qa line 'Put it in the 8e.5 record (/qa) or under each
proposed test (/qa-only)'; judge samples for 'qa-only/SKILL.md workflow'
(actionability at the 4.0 gate in run 37151477069, 3.67 in 36907895813)
flag the /qa-only-irrelevant 8e.5 record. The qa-mode bar now renders the
invoking skill's location; both skills get shorter.

* test-of-test ratchet: a repo script or setup read by path counts as product code

codex-invocation-sites (runs scripts/gen-skill-docs.ts), gstack-config-gbrain-refresh
(copies bin/<name> through a variable) and setup-cso-windows-probe (reads setup and
scripts/build-cso-windows.ps1) exercise product code the detector could not see.

* I1: DX floor actor strips the editor hint from the footer line only (from #2971)

The custom-field reply normalization removed 'ctrl+g to edit in <editor>'
from every line, so question text that resembled the menu footer could be
rewritten and still authenticate. Only the last non-empty line is the
footer. Ported from Garry's #2971 with its negative control.

* I4: attribute every census testcase; deselections never count as SKIPPED

The paid report counted every skipped JUnit testcase as SKIPPED and every
testcase whose name was not a registry id as unattributed. On the 2026-10-03
census (run 37151477069) that was SKIPPED 82 / unattributed 72 (periodic) and
SKIPPED 282 / unattributed 24 (gate), and every case-shard sibling also wrote a
skipped history record that reset its pass-rate series.

- attributeJUnitCase: a name is its registry id or CASE_TEST_NAMES label, else
the only id its file registers, else the keyless file itself. Skipped
other-tier cases, case-shard siblings, isolated or unselected cases and Bun's
'(unnamed)' hook placeholders are zero-credit deselections with a reason and
write no history record. Anything else is listed by name as unattributed.
- One result and one history record per case per shard; a genuinely skipped
selected case counts as SKIPPED and is listed with its reason, also in
report-summary.md and collector-outcomes.json. SKIPPED panels show their
reason and skipped trials are no longer called assertions.
- CASE_TEST_NAMES labels for the three /cso cases.
- tierSkipReason: a computed registration whose lane-tier ids are all
registered to other test files is excluded at plan time, so the four gate
and two periodic files that ran with every test skipped no longer take a
runner.

Census rerun: periodic SKIPPED 0 / unattributed 0, gate SKIPPED 0 /
unattributed 0; verdicts unchanged.

* I5: split the deploy file per case; guard PR-lane shard walls at 600 s

test/skill-e2e-deploy.test.ts ran 668 s as one gate shard in the 2026-10-03
census (six sequential cases, 51-201 s each). It is now case-sharded, so each
case is its own shard with its own (smaller) supervision budget; no timeout
or budget was raised.

- CASE_SHARDED_FILES gains the deploy file (names already equal ids).
- Gate duration seeds for the six case keys from the census JUnit walls, so
packing stays at 12 gate-census slices (CI cap 230m -> 200m).
- shardDurationViolations + PR_LANE_SHARD_LIMIT_MS: a free test fails when a
planned gate shard's recorded wall (committed seed, and the last gate census
in test/fixtures/paid-report-census/gate-census-durations.json) exceeds 600 s.
- Tests that pinned deploy as one shard follow the split (cookie planner keys,
reuse fixture key, release/PR floors).

* TODOS: /review fingerprint under Codex's read-only .git sandbox (found by the live Codex check)

* Free-suite repairs from the first integrated Ubicloud run

Product:
- Outside-voice fences carry runtimeRootPrelude(ctx) explicitly again, so the
resolver output runs on its own (the post-render pass skips fences that
already assign GSTACK_ROOT); outsideVoiceRuntime stays deleted.
- D5: an explicit CHROMIUM_PROFILE (gbrowser's per-workspace gbd) is never
seeded from the shared profile or registered for `browse profiles prune`;
this was also the free suite's write to the real ~/.gstack/browse-profiles.json.
- gstack-ios-qa-daemon: BASH_COMPAT=50 for its >512-byte --help heredoc.

Tests migrated to the wave's deliberate contract changes:
- B1 heading admits `unverified`; sandbox flag is ${_GSTACK_CODEX_SANDBOX:?};
verdict-form output (VERDICT/FINDINGS/REASON); fake codex follows the
preflight + stdin + -o form; Q2 notice marked shown in a private state root.
- C1: an exported root needs bin/ and lib/; a lone GSTACK_BIN is not honored.
- C4: plan-ceo-review is carved on every host (carrier, discovery and
methodology fixtures read sections/ when the render has it).
- E7: READY prints the resolved Aside path.
- INV-3: the cookie-approval reconstruction reverses the bun-install mktemp template.
- F1's `Plan:` binding read gets a reasoned tracker-guard exemption.
- Browse stubs stop their server instead of scheduling process.exit; the
headless launch check only counts browsers its own launch started.

* Regenerate generated output after the outside-voice prelude repair

* I1: revert the seccomp-only eval container option; it does not let Codex's sandbox start

Run 37158847998 on this branch and a stock Ubicloud VM both show that
seccomp=unconfined only moves bubblewrap's failure from 'No permissions to
create a new namespace' to 'Failed to make / slave: Permission denied'.
Codex's sandbox started only with the host sysctl
kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns=0 plus seccomp and AppArmor
unconfined on the container, which a container job cannot set from its
steps. The relaxation bought nothing, so it goes; the fix is filed as a
TODO for the integrator.

This reverts commit ec97187.

* I1: a Codex review eval needs a completed command, not just review-shaped text

Run 37158847998 recorded codex-review-findings as passed again: the agent
wrote 'I couldn't run the review because the execution sandbox failed
(bwrap: Failed to make / slave)', the failure never reached stderr or a
command event, and no phrase rule matched. validateCodexReview now also
requires at least one command_execution event that completed with exit 0.
Fixtures gain that event; the CI output is a new negative control.

* Evals lane follow-ups: close the skillify gate TODO (I2 green), file its open reds, CHANGELOG lines; refresh measured parity annotations

* Regenerate generated output after merging wave/evals

* D2: bound the navigation guard's tab reset (commit, 5 s)

Ubicloud run 3: a click to a link-local link reported the block, but the
reset's page.goto('about:blank') waited the full 30 s default navigation
timeout, so the command hung past the test deadline and the stale block
leaked into the next command. The reset now waits for commit only, with a
5 s bound.

* I1: run Codex paid slices on a host-run job where bubblewrap can start

Docker's default seccomp/AppArmor profiles and the Ubuntu 24.04 host's
kernel.apparmor_restrict_unprivileged_userns=1 keep Codex's bubblewrap
sandbox from starting in a job container, so every Codex command failed.
The planner now packs Codex shards into their own slices (plan.codexSlices,
validated against the entries); evals-periodic runs those slices on a new
host-run job that lifts the host restriction and runs the same CI image
with seccomp and AppArmor unconfined. Artifact names match eval-slices,
so the report reconciles one manifest. Gate plans have no Codex slices.

* I1: the /codex review eval passes only when Codex executed

Run 37158847998 recorded codex-review as passed while the sandbox
preflight said unavailable and no review ran: the case only checked the
session exit and an optional output file. It now requires the shared
validator's executed verdict (findings, clean or unverified) in the
codex command's own output and a written, non-fail-closed GATE.

* TODOS: characterize the free-suite timing reds from Ubicloud run 4

* I1: QA evidence names the probes to rerun after an input change, before the one-shot materialize

ship-exploratory-late-input returned inconclusive in gate census 37158847998:
the fixture locale changed after captures 001 and 002, the agent reran only
input 9, and materialize (which publishes once) recorded capture 001 as open.
Its next line then said to rerun what is open, which the published verdict no
longer allowed. Every capture now lists the commands that observed an older
input snapshot and have no rerun on current inputs (revalidate, plus the next
line), and materialize's next line says the verdict is final.

* I1: the eng batching counter reads records under "Section N — <review> review" headings

plan-eng-multi-finding-batching failed in 6 of 12 runs with reviewCount 0-1
(or a timeout with every ask counted as Step 0). In run 37158847998 the agent
asked 11 separate questions, each with a saved ledger record, but filed
records R2-R10 under '## Section 1 — Architecture review'. The counter strips
'Section 1' but not the dash separator, so it rejected every record outside
the Decision ledger and the floor never filled. Quoted, historical and
unrelated headings still do not count.

* I1: plan-eng-review-artifact names its report file without making it the only output

Runs 37151477069 and 37158847998 wrote the whole review, including the
GSTACK REVIEW REPORT, into review-output.md and never ran the Test Plan
Artifact block. #3017 made the artifact a hard assertion and dropped the
prompt's explicit artifact instruction, leaving 'Write your review to
review-output.md' as the one named destination. The prompt now names that
file as the selected report file and says every other output keeps the
destination the skill gives it, without naming the artifact.

* browse: close returns when Chromium exits; Xvfb cleanup does not wait on its own zombie

BrowserManager.close() detached every 'disconnected' listener before
browser.close(). That also removed Playwright's internal listener that
resolves close(), so every launched-mode close waited the full 5 s race
timeout (measured 5,000 ms on origin/main and on this branch; raw Playwright
closes in ~50 ms), and Playwright 1.62 has no Browser.process() for the
SIGKILL fallback. The daemon's SIGINT shutdown therefore took over 5 s, which
reddened the CLI lifecycle test under load (1 of 8 on main) and left browsers
alive at shard cleanup. gstack now detaches only its own listeners: close
takes ~50 ms.

cleanupXvfb treated a terminated Xvfb child as alive until our own blocked
event loop reaped it, so every close waited a full second then sent SIGKILL
to a zombie. A zombie now counts as exited; the display test counts only
running Xvfb processes.

* I1: office-hours-brain-writeback reads the long skill with Read and skips the preamble

4 of 18 trials ended error_max_turns at the unchanged 12-turn budget with a
gbrain search but no gbrain put. The failing trial in 37151477069 read the
1260-line rendered SKILL.md with cat, got truncated output, spent four more
turns re-reading it with sed, then ran the preamble's skill-start block. The
passing trials skipped the preamble. The prompt now says to read the skill
with the Read tool and skip the preamble, onboarding, telemetry and
contributor sections, as the plan-eng fixtures already do. Budget unchanged.

* CI: no credential-shaped URLs in added lines (quality scan); release floor measured on the merged tree

The quality job's credential scan of the PR diff flagged 7 db.url_with_password
lines: three docs lines now describe the login instead of spelling a URL, and
three tests build the URL from parts. paid-retry-supervision's periodic release
floor is the merged tree's measured 35,711 (main's value; the evals lane's
33,821 predates main's new paid files).

* qa-evidence: hold the stdout-pipe cases on a FIFO, not on a paused child stream

Ubicloud run 4 finished the blocked-forever case in 71 ms (it should take the
5 s write deadline): the 2 MB write was not held, because saturation depended
on how the runtime buffers a paused child pipe. On POSIX the child's stdout is
now a FIFO the test reads only when it chooses to, so the kernel holds the
write; Windows keeps the paused pipe.

* TODOS/CHANGELOG: the three run-4 timing reds are fixed at their causes (daemon close latency, FIFO-held pipe tests)

* I1: a QA helper call bun could not load is checked at the installed path, not failed outright

review-exploratory-small-cli failed gate census 37162480720 with 'command
outside declared caller observation interface': the actor dropped one
character from the shard directory in a gstack-qa-evidence capture path, bun
refused to load it ('Module not found', exit 1), and the next call ran the
same capture correctly. A failed call whose only output is bun's refusal for
a gstack-qa-evidence/deadline path is now held to the interface as the same
command at the installed helper path, so a compound or undeclared command
still fails.

* I1: plan-eng-review's final self-check names its three outputs

The fixture-prompt repair did not hold: in 37162480720 plan-eng-review-artifact
again wrote one review-output.md, ran the skeleton's read-back gate on it and
stopped without the QA Test Plan artifact (no gstack-paths/gstack-slug block).
The transcript shows the agent's last check before finishing is the skeleton's
Section self-check, which said only 'and outputs'. It now names the saved
report, the QA Test Plan artifact and the Review Log, each at its own
destination or presented as not persisted (the existing write policy).

* I1: revert the plan-eng-review self-check wording; it did not change the artifact outcome

A local run of plan-eng-review-artifact in the CI image (Claude Code 2.1.284)
at e2f65ab22 still wrote one review-output.md in 8 turns and ran no Bash, so
the QA Test Plan artifact block never ran. Keep the skill text unchanged; the
case is deferred with its evidence.

* I1: seed the Codex files' periodic durations from their first executing run

Every Codex file recorded ~1 s because its commands could not start in the
container (codex-e2e*, outside-voice, workflow). Run 37162480720 executed them
on the host-run job; its slice 24 walls replace the placeholders so the
planner packs the Codex slice by real work (7 files, ~4.9 min estimated).

* Refresh scripts/free-test-durations.json (bun run test:ubicloud --record-durations; covers the wave's new test files)

* evals2 follow-ups: outside-voice-evidence helper in five case touchfiles; close the evals lane's Codex-CI, late-input, batching and brain-writeback TODOs (run 37162480720); CHANGELOG lines

* fix(browse): take the next free X display when a concurrent allocator wins the race

Pick-then-spawn let two allocators (parallel daemons or test shards) choose
the same free display; the losing Xvfb exited and the handoff failed (run 6,
handoff 'failure before launch'). spawnFreeXvfb now treats a display taken
during startup as a collision and moves on. Regression test forces the race
with a delayed Xvfb wrapper (pre-fix: fails; two-process repro 13/15 -> 0/15).

* test(ci): read the host-run Codex eval job's docker env, mounts and uploads

eval-codex-slices runs on the host and passes its executor env through docker
-e flags and HOME through a $RUNNER_TEMP/eval-home mount. The evidence and
coordination tests now map those back to the container view instead of
assuming job.container, and the job's native-capture upload carries the
qa-callers paths like the other executors.

* I1: plan-eng-review-artifact runs the real interactive review in a PTY, replacing the composing fixture

The claude -p case told the model to skip the preamble and questions and go
straight to the review. In 37151477069, 37158847998, 37162480720 and a local
CI-image run it wrote the whole review into one file without executing the
workflow, so it measured composing, not /plan-eng-review. The interactive
batching PTY run in 37158847998 did write the artifact during Test review, so
there is no product defect.

New test/skill-e2e-plan-eng-artifact.test.ts keeps the case id, tier
(periodic), kind (rule) and budget (CAPTURE_LONG_MS): it drives the real
/plan-eng-review over the same dashboard plan and sources, answers each
question with its first option, stops once the QA test plan exists or the
report completes, and asserts the same requirement (exactly one new
eng-review test plan in the run's own state root, about the dashboard change).
The composing case is retired from skill-e2e-plan.test.ts in this commit.
runPlanSkillCounting reports engTestPlans (read before fixture cleanup) and
passes them to isCollectionComplete. One paid run in the CI image (Claude Code
2.1.284): pass, collection_complete at 498 s with one test plan.

The new file takes its own periodic runner (seeded at 498 s), so the periodic
census plans 26 slices: the planner's --max-parallel and both executors' caps
move from 25 to 26 so every slice still starts at once; the paid-file census
pin moves from 106 to 107.

* evals2 final: plan-eng-review-artifact touchfiles point at its PTY file and helpers; plan file wall drops the moved case

Applies the lane's touchfiles-data patch (its outside-voice-evidence hunks
were already in 9a96fb3). skill-e2e-plan.test.ts lost one 600 s case to
skill-e2e-plan-eng-artifact.test.ts, so its periodic wall is two 900 s + two
600 s (3,000,000 + reserve) and its timeout pin lists the remaining cases.

* TODOS/CHANGELOG: close plan-eng-review-artifact (real PTY review, 498 s pass)

* test: plan-eng-review-artifact is a PTY runner consumer (selected by claude-pty-runner and pty-screen changes)

* test(windows): spawn cmd.exe hooks verbatim, use a .invalid UNC host, and match CRLF fixtures and native separators

windows-free-tests reds on 364f0f3, each verified on windows-latest
(46 pass, 1 POSIX-only skip, 0 fail):
- investigate-freeze-path cmd.exe cases: Bun MSVC-quoted the command line
cmd.exe parses, so cmd saw \"bash and failed; Node's shell spawn (what
Claude Code uses) passes it verbatim.
- investigate-freeze-path UNC cases: a single-label host made each
filesystem probe wait on network name resolution (cd 11 s, -L 2.8 s);
a reserved .invalid host fails at once (55-80 ms).
- paid-report-census: the junit fixture is CRLF in a Windows checkout.
- codex-invocation-sites: rendered paths use backslashes on Windows.

* eval(plan-design-with-ui): the Step 0D focus title may spell the seven dimensions as a word

Run 37166586458 slice 5 (dfaf154) asked 'D2 - Review all seven design
dimensions, or focus on specific areas?' and reached its review finding,
but the focus predicate only accepted the numeral, so the case failed with
no acknowledged Design focus. Both recognizers accept 7 or seven; the
byte-exact capture is a free regression, and engineering/other-count/
no-'design' titles stay rejected.

* eval(ship-docsync): git check-ignore is a declared read in the docs observation interface

Run 37166586458 slice 2 (dfaf154): ship-docsync-completion's parent ran
'git check-ignore -v .qa-state' to verify the prompt's claim that the
observer probe is Git-excluded. The read was outside the closed Git list,
so the run's DOC_PATH replacement was unprovable and failed. check-ignore
cannot write; it joins the list and the interface prose. Free regression
replays the captured command against the fixture and keeps composition and
redirects rejected.

* fix(browse): read Xvfb's own startup error to classify a lost display race

Run 10 (1ffd38e) failed handoff's concurrent promotion once: 'Xvfb on :100
exited during startup (code 1)' with the display free again by the exit
check, so a holder that won the lock and closed within the 100 ms poll
looked like a broken install. Startup stderr now goes to a private file;
'Server is already active for display' is a collision and moves on, and any
other startup exit carries Xvfb's fatal line. Regression: a stub that
reports the collision for one display and exits leaves spawnFreeXvfb on the
next display (pre-fix: the misleading install error).

* test: merged-main fixtures (E6 copies the Claude render library gstack-config now sources; the census fixture's plan-mode-no-op budget follows its v1.91.18.0 policy)

* qa: materialize runs once per PROBE_DIR, and qa-only says §1 reuses the REPORT_DIR it resolved

Run 37170610789 slice 3 (feaa28d): the qa-only workflow judge scored
clarity 3.33 and named two ambiguities: §4 said materialize runs once per
report root while mixed runs materialize each surface's PROBE_DIR, and
SKILL.md deferred exploratory §1 without saying §1 reuses the REPORT_DIR
resolved under Prepare Report Artifacts. A local run of the same judge on
the repaired text: clarity 3.67, completeness 4.33, actionability 4 (pass);
all three samples call the workflow internally consistent.

* Regenerate generated output for the qa materialize/REPORT_DIR wording

* eval: three detector defects from run 37170610789 (feaa28d)

- safety-codex-consult-embed: the fake codex recorded argv only, but every
codex exec takes its prompt on stdin since E5; it records stdin for the
'-' form and the check reads both.
- ship-docsync-missing-asset: 'ls ... 2>&1' on a read-only command is the
same harmless stderr wrapper as '2>/dev/null'; stdout redirects, pipes
and script calls stay rejected.
- qa-functional-webhook-fix: a pre-repair capture whose command reran on
the repaired inputs may be classified superseded (exploratory §4); the
evidence check accepts that and still rejects superseded on a post-repair
capture or one never rerun.
Each free regression fails without its repair.

* fix(test:free): a browser record removed mid-read by a shutting-down daemon is absent

Run 13 (feaa28d) needed the flaky-retry for 'owned detached browser
settlement > cancel': 2 unattributed failures instead of 1. A 16-vCPU
stress run reproduced it once in 64 with the cause:
'browser ownership unavailable'. On SIGINT the cancelled daemon removes its
state file; record() saw it exist, then lstat/read hit ENOENT, which
failure() reports as an ownership error. ENOENT there now means absent.
New mode cancel-vanishing-record forces the removal between the check and
the read (pre-fix: 2 unattributed, deterministic; now 1).

* test(windows): the 2>&1 wrapper regression uses relative reads (no native paths in literal commands)

* test(plan-seed): wait for the fixture CLI's slash event instead of a fixed 50 ms

Run 14 (b2f729b) needed the flaky-retry for 'startup-placeholder': the
events log had paste/enter/end_turn but not yet the slash 50 ms after it
was sent. The check now polls (bounded 5 s); the deadline assertion
measures when submission settled, which is what it bounds. One test
typecheck diagnostic goes away with the typed reader.

* eval(plan-design-with-ui): recognize the Step 0D focus question by meaning, not one title spelling

The b2f729b gate run titled it "I've rated this plan 5/10 on design
completeness. Review all 7 dimensions, or focus on specific areas?", the
third native wording to miss a spelling-pinned regex. The native form is
now a class: a title that offers all seven (numeral or word) dimensions or
passes versus a focus and names design. Captured titles from 37166586458
and this run pass; other counts, engineering passes, titles without design
or without a focus stay rejected.

* eval(shared-libs-read-only): curl answers the provider rate-limit probe with the same 404 as gh

Gate census 37174266054 slice 9: the model probed API availability with
curl -o /dev/null https://api.github.com/rate_limit (GET, discarded). The
gh transport already answers rate_limit as an unknown endpoint (404); the
curl transport refused it, and the refusal counted as a read-only
violation. curl now gets the same 404. POST, file output, other repos and
raw hosts stay refused. Paid rerun (gate, 1 trial): PASS in 177 s.

* eval(shared-libs-plan-callers): an exclusion may combine states (unchanged/out of scope)

Periodic census 37174266054: every option ended 'Scheduler semantics,
existing callers and helper hardening stay unchanged/out of scope', which
the actor read as proposing hardening. Exclusion states may now be joined
by '/', 'or' or 'and'; the captured question is answered, and clauses that
pair a state with a real change ('stay unchanged/harden the helper') are
still refused. Paid rerun (periodic, 1 trial): PASS in 296 s.

* paid: --case plan-eng-review-artifact selects its PTY test by its registered name

A local --case run matched 0 tests (no spend): the PTY test's Bun name is
not its case id, and CASE_TEST_NAMES had no label for it.

* eval(plan-eng-review-artifact): periodic checkpoint resumes at Test review; the fresh full run moves to marathon

A fresh interactive /plan-eng-review cannot reach Test review inside the
600 s periodic budget: startup plus one-at-a-time Scope Challenge questions
took 595 s with six questions and no Test review in census 37174266054 and
in a local run (one earlier fresh run passed at 498 s). Per the eval-speed
policy, the long run moves to the non-blocking marathon lane and the
blocking case becomes a focused checkpoint.

- plan-eng-review-artifact (periodic, 600 s unchanged): resumes the real
interactive skill from a saved review record: the plan, the Scope
Challenge result, Sections 1-2 complete, and a Decision ledger rebuilt
from that census run's six actual native questions and answers
(test/fixtures/plan-eng-artifact-resume-37174266054.json). The live skill
runs Section 3, Test review. Assertion unchanged: exactly one new
eng-review test plan in the run's own state root, about the dashboard
change. Paid trial (local, Claude Code 2.1.284): PASS, 364 s.
- plan-eng-review-artifact-full (marathon, PTY_LONG_MS): the fresh
start-to-finish run with the same assertion; budget measured beside it.
- test/plan-eng-resume.test.ts proves the rebuilt record is a valid resume
point and rejects missing, unanswered, edited or duplicated records.
- Registry: touchfiles, tiers, kinds, test-name labels, durations, paid
file count 115, PTY consumer list; CHANGELOG and TODOS.

* setup-deploy: say which deploy fields count as confirmed, how to resolve the default branch, and group the detection tests

Periodic census 37176837432: the setup-deploy workflow judge's actionability
mean was 3.67 (4, 4, 3). The low sample named the Fly/Heroku/Railway/GitHub
Actions deploy trigger left undefined until Step 4's 'not already confirmed'
catch-all and an unstated way to find <default branch>, and misread
'A || B && C' detection lines. Step 4 now defines a confirmed field and names
the paths that leave the trigger unset, <default branch> resolves with
gh repo view, and the two OR'd detection tests are grouped explicitly (same
behavior). One judge run on the repaired text: 4/4/4, pass.

* Regenerate generated output for the setup-deploy wording

* TODOS: census data for the skipped CEO mode handoff (mode-routing, auto-decide-preserved); floor runner Edit-permission parse under collapsed TTY spaces

* fix(browse): a blocked navigation that fails at once leaves the tab blank and the next command clean

PR CI on 8d2d269 (free-suite 3): the redirect to [::ffff:169.254.170.2]
failed immediately on the runner, so its chrome-error page committed around
the guard's about:blank reset, and leaving the error page committed a
second about:blank after the reset resolved, interrupting the next three
tests' gotos. The guard now lets the blocked request settle (bounded at
1 s; a hanging target is still cut off by the reset), resets, and waits for
the main frame to stay quiet before returning. Regression: a redirect to a
blocked address on Chromium's unsafe port 1 fails at once (pre-fix: blank
check and the next goto fail, deterministically).

* qa: the checkpoint note is created for browser runs and composed for functional ones

Periodic census 37178143007: the qa-only workflow judge scored
actionability 3.67 again; one sample read step 2's 'Create
exploration-NNN.json' as applying to functional runs before reaching
'Functional: do not write this file'. The sentence now names both surfaces
up front; byte-neutral (the browser line drops its restated clause), qa
union 1.1098 under its 1.110 cap. One judge run on the repaired text:
3.67/4/4, pass.

* Regenerate generated output for the qa checkpoint wording

* eval(section-loading): byte-range prints of a section count as a complete read

Periodic census 37178143007: plan-ceo-section-loading printed
review-sections.md in five byte ranges (head -c 16000, then tail -c +N |
head -c 17000, one-byte overlaps) and the detector, which matched whole
printed lines, saw the lines split at each range edge as missing. Outputs
of the commands that name the section are also joined on their overlap.
Regression: the captured ranges count; dropping a middle range or the last
range does not (pre-fix: the complete ranges were refused).

* test(plan-design-review): count design terms the review wrote into the plan

* fix(aside): probe names the platform (GSTACK_PLATFORM override) so the macOS pitch never re-probes the OS

* fix(plan-ceo-review): Step 0E mode handoff runs gstack-ceo-mode-handoff so the selected mode is printed, not only composed

* chore: refresh context-budget fixture

* test(auto-decide): accept Step 0E's documented AUTO_DECIDE line with its decisions suffix; replay the captured trial

* docs: CHANGELOG and TODOS for the CEO mode handoff and platform line

* test(plan-design-review): plan-term credit needs a rated summary; adapter regression for census 37179171083

* test(auto-decide): the printed handoff may precede Step 0E's provenance log; replay census 37182865432; TODOS for two rotating census reds

* test(plan-ceo-section-loading): read the skill's ledger and currentDecision records for the stale-fill decision; replay three census reports

* test: $B counts as a browser call only in command position; qa functional prompt defines its classification values

* test(shared-libs-plan-callers): a verbless unchanged-scope list is an exclusion; replay census 37186854666; TODOS for two census reds

* fix(settings-hook): retry a lock released between mkdir and the existence check instead of dropping the mutation

* test(ship-docsync): the child's reply to a parent SendMessage counts as its spawned-marker report; replay PR run 37188668421

* test(browse): Xvfb stub-failure tests allocate from ranges no other allocator uses

* perf(ship): documentation gate snapshots and compares its candidate with gstack-docs-candidate

* fix(review): unverified Codex mode runs the passes in the mode summary too; stale-fill decision check accepts any ledger row ID

* test(shared-libs-plan-callers): judge scope by forbidden verb+object actions, not an exclusion grammar; replay six refusals and four passing censuses

* test(shared-libs-plan-callers): type the brief-line parameter

* test(ship-docsync): an inline-code status quote is not a false current claim; replay PR run 37196811165

* fix(review,ship): Codex challenge and structured-review bodies run in unverified mode, matching their headers

* docs(TODOS): overlay-harness control-arm error and format-approach provider refusals, with run links

* docs(TODOS): qa-only workflow judge data point

---------

Co-authored-by: Lewis <lewispeel@hotmail.com>
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2026-10-04 07:58:41 -07:00

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Raw Blame History

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 (about 30 seconds of setup — see below)
Run /office-hours — describe what you're building
Run /plan-ceo-review on any feature idea
Run /review on any branch with changes
Run /qa on your staging URL or an isolated local API, CLI, job or webhook
Stop there. You'll know if this is for you.

Install — about 30 seconds

./setup took 31 seconds after the clone on a 4-vCPU Linux cloud machine (v1.91.13.0, clean HOME, including the binary build and the Chromium download). Slower networks and laptops take longer.

Requirements: Claude Code, Git, Bun v1.0+, Node.js (Windows only). Recommended on macOS: the Aside browser (macOS 15+) — browser skills, /make-pdf, and /diagram drive it first, with your real logged-in sessions. Without it, ./setup builds gstack's own bundled browser and the same skills use that. /cso additionally needs a Bun release with all four --no-compile-autoload-* build flags plus a native toolchain: a static-capable C compiler on Linux, Xcode command-line tools on macOS, or Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with Desktop development with C++ on Windows. If those are absent, setup installs everything else, removes stale CSO helpers, and /cso reports not assessed with the prerequisite.

When qualified CSO runtime images are published, setup gives each automatic preload a 30-second window plus a bounded setup allowance for the declared catalog. For slower registries, set an integer such as GSTACK_CSO_IMAGE_PULL_TIMEOUT_SECONDS=120 (accepted range: 5–300 seconds). One image timing out does not consume the remaining images' windows; setup reports partial progress and a later run resumes from exact digests already present in local Docker. The complete preload is capped at one hour.

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 && ./setup then 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, /deslop-shared-libs, /test-audit, /ship, /land-and-deploy, /canary, /benchmark, /browse, /connect-chrome, /qa, /qa-only, /design-review, /scrape, /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 && ./setup to 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 runs on more agents than Claude. Bare ./setup installs for Claude Code only. Pick another agent with --host <name>, or install for every agent setup detects on this machine with --host auto:

git clone --single-branch --depth 1 https://github.com/garrytan/gstack.git ~/gstack
cd ~/gstack && ./setup --host auto      # or: ./setup --host codex
./setup --status                         # one row per install: host, tier, scope, version, path

An explicit --host X installs for X only and never changes another agent's install. /gstack-upgrade refreshes every install it registered, one row per host, and says which ones failed.

Tiers: full is certified by a real workflow run (see Certify your host); experimental installs and passes the conformance tests but has no certification run yet; instruction-only installs nothing: setup prints what to copy.

Agent	Tier	Install	First invocation	Safety skills	Outside review needs	Repair
Claude Code	full	`--host claude` (default)	`/office-hours`	enforced (hooks block)	Codex CLI, signed in	`./setup --host claude`
OpenAI Codex CLI	experimental	`--host codex` → `${CODEX_HOME:-~/.codex}/skills/gstack-*/`	ask for `gstack-office-hours`	advisory, not blocked	Claude Code CLI, signed in	`./setup --host codex`
OpenCode	experimental	`--host opencode` → `~/.config/opencode/skills/gstack-/` + `/gstack-` commands	`/gstack-office-hours`	advisory, not blocked	Codex CLI, signed in	`./setup --host opencode`
Cursor	experimental	`--host cursor` → `~/.cursor/skills/gstack-*/`	ask for `gstack-office-hours`	advisory, not blocked	Codex CLI, signed in	`./setup --host cursor`
Factory Droid	experimental	`--host factory` → `~/.factory/skills/gstack-*/`	ask for `gstack-office-hours`	advisory, not blocked	Codex CLI, signed in	`./setup --host factory`
Kiro	experimental	`--host kiro` → `~/.kiro/skills/gstack-*/`	ask for `gstack-office-hours`	advisory, not blocked	Codex CLI, signed in	`./setup --host kiro`
GitHub Copilot CLI	experimental	`--host copilot` → `~/.copilot/skills/gstack-*/`	`/gstack-office-hours`	advisory, not blocked	Codex CLI, signed in	`./setup --host copilot`
Slate	instruction-only	`--host slate` (points at the Claude install; Slate reads `.claude/skills`)	`/office-hours` via the Claude install	advisory, not blocked	—	`./setup --host claude`
OpenClaw	instruction-only	`--host openclaw` (prints the digest path; ACP spawns Claude Code — docs/OPENCLAW.md)	"Load gstack. Run /review"	advisory, not blocked	—	re-copy the digest after upgrades
Hermes	instruction-only	`--host hermes` (prints the digest path and `gen:skill-docs --host hermes`)	copy the digest, or render skills yourself	advisory, not blocked	—	re-copy the digest after upgrades
GBrain (mod)	instruction-only	`--host gbrain` (brain-aware variants ship from the GBrain repo)	—	advisory, not blocked	—	—

Copilot invokes gstack skills by their prefixed names (/gstack-review) because /review is a Copilot built-in. Copilot ignores skill hooks, so /careful and /freeze only advise there, and COPILOT_HOME other than ~/.copilot is not supported yet (setup refuses and changes nothing).

Outside reviews require the selected CLI to be installed and authenticated: Claude Code when using gstack in Codex, or Codex on other harnesses. External harnesses discover these commands as /gstack-claude-code and /gstack-codex; each harness omits its own wrapper. Explicit provider requests keep that provider. The existing codex_reviews setting controls automatic outside reviews where supported, regardless of the provider selected.

/claude has been renamed to /claude-code. Re-run ./setup --host <name> to migrate managed installations, including other harnesses sharing the checkout. Setup preserves the previous installation if replacement generation or installation fails and prints repair instructions.

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, falling back to gpt-6-astra when no usable model is configured. 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.

Which Codex model gstack uses. For every Codex call (outside voices, /codex, review and ship adversarial passes), gstack picks the model in this order: a model you name for that request, then GSTACK_CODEX_MODEL, then model in your Codex config.toml (for native codex review, review_model first; a custom CODEX_HOME is honored), and only then gstack's default, gpt-6-astra. Before spending anything, it prints the choice and where it came from, for example CODEX_MODEL: gpt-5.6-terra (exec; source: ~/.codex/config.toml model). If your choice is invalid or your account cannot use it, gstack stops with a repair message and reports the outside review as unavailable. It never silently switches to its default. Nested Codex reviews also run with installed skills hidden (-c skills.include_instructions=false), so a review cannot turn into a whole nested skill run. Runtime model selection is separate from the setup-time behavioral profile above. /claude-code (gstack-claude-code on Codex) preserves Claude's configured model. Set GSTACK_CLAUDE_MODEL=<model> or name a model in your request to override it for the invocation, including resumed consultations. See eval defaults and overrides for capture, judge, and benchmark model selection.

The design binary ($D) uses OpenAI's gpt-5.5 by default, with image generation through gpt-image-2. Set GSTACK_DESIGN_MODEL=<model> to use another gpt-5-class model for both image generation and screenshot analysis; if OpenAI rejects it, the error names GSTACK_DESIGN_MODEL. Check a key against the defaults with bun run design/scripts/live-model-check.ts.

Want to add support for another agent? See docs/ADDING_A_HOST.md. Rendering a new agent is one TypeScript config file; installing it also needs a setup arm and the conformance kit, and it starts as experimental.

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. Writes `DESIGN.md` in the open DESIGN.md format, so impeccable, Google Stitch, and any tool that reads it share one file.
`/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.
`/deslop-shared-libs`	Shared Code Reviewer	Find worthwhile shared-code extractions in recent work. Compares up to five opportunities and recommends the best three, with source evidence, reliability gains, and total code savings. Recommendations only.
`/test-audit`	Test Auditor	Sweep existing tests for ones that cost more than they protect: source greps, duplicates, assertion-free probes, test-only exports. Every candidate carries an evidence card; report-only unless you approve a batch.
`/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. If you have impeccable installed, its engine runs first and every mechanical finding arrives tagged with its rule id.
`/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). One slop-gate pass through the impeccable engine when you have it. The output is shippable, not a demo.
`/qa`	QA Lead	Explore browser, API, CLI, job and webhook behavior. Reproduce bugs, write failing regressions, fix the cause and re-verify before committing.
`/qa-only`	QA Reporter	Explore and report with replayable evidence. Suggest regression cases without changing product code or tests.
`/pair-agent`	Multi-Agent Coordinator	Share gstack's own 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. (Runs on the bundled browser — the fallback engine; agents driving Aside just open their own tabs.)
`/cso`	Chief Security Officer	Security audit with an application model, supported findings, independent challenge, and explicit coverage. Static assessment remains available without catalog profiles. With matching qualified profiles, comprehensive mode adds contained runtime/scanner execution and reviewable repair candidates for Node/Bun, Python, and Rails. Runtime-tested bundles authenticate separate external assertions. Project-test completion remains `self_reported` because target code controls the test process; `tested` is reserved for a future target-independent completion witness.
`/ship`	Release Engineer	Sync main, run tests, explore changed behavior, audit coverage and docs, then verify, push and open a PR.
`/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	Audit changed behavior against project docs on every ship, before final verification and publication. Also runs standalone. Shows updated, reviewed/current or blocked docs and any remaining gaps.
`/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. Drives your Aside browser first — your real sessions, real clicks, real screenshots — through deterministic `aside repl` scripts. No Aside? It falls back to gstack's own Chromium: real clicks, ~100ms per command, and `/open-gstack-browser` shows it headed with sidebar, anti-bot stealth, and auto model routing. Every other browser skill stands on it.
`/scrape`	Data Extractor	Pull structured data off a web page — tables, lists, prices — in your Aside browser with the page's real logged-in state. On the fallback browser, `/skillify` turns the flow into a permanent browser-skill that runs in ~200ms next time.
`/setup-browser-cookies`	Session Manager	Copy selected cookies from Chrome, Chromium, Brave, Edge, Windows-only Opera and Opera GX, or macOS-only Comet, Arc, and Dia into gstack's bundled browser. Choose your profile and domains; copying and sign-in verification are separate. Only needed on the fallback path — Aside already has your sessions.
`/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). Outside-review quality gate before filing (Claude Code on Codex; Codex on other harnesses; 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.

QA without a webpage

Use the same commands for browser and non-browser software. Start in a repository with its documented native command and an isolated local fixture; name the target and the behavior you want checked. For example:

/qa-only Test this repo's CLI using its documented local fixture. Check valid and invalid input, exit codes, stdout/stderr, and cancellation. Report only; do not change code or tests. For each finding, include the exact command, expected and actual results, and which checks remain untested. Keep requests inside the fixture; ask before contacting an external service.

/qa Test this repo's local webhook and worker fixture. Explore duplicate deliveries and recovery after a partial failure. Keep all effects inside the fixture; preserve reproduced bugs in native regression tests before repairing them.

QA first tells you which surface, tools and write permissions it will use. A CLI or API does not need a browser. Browser targets keep real browser testing; developer experience audits load only when onboarding, installation or ergonomics are in scope. If the native tools or safe fixture are unavailable, the report names the blocker and untested contracts instead of inventing a pass or installing another framework.

Exploration means learning from each result and choosing the next useful challenge, not running random commands. Before the next discovery probe, QA saves a short exploration-NNN.json evidence note with the previous result, the assumption being tested and the next command. The final report links these notes; they do not require an extra chat message between probes. A discovered bug must be reproducible, and its new test must fail for the bug before the repair and pass afterward. Unit tests protect logic; integration and end-to-end tests protect real boundaries that mocks would hide. /qa-only proposes those tests without writing them.

Normal /review and /ship run a bounded version on changed behavior and nearby risks automatically, including small diffs without a plan or web server. Existing fix/test approval rules still apply. Missing dependencies, denied actions and time limits remain visible coverage gaps; a short smoke pass never means exhaustive QA. Production access and destructive or external effects require specific permission.

Bounded exploration uses an executable deadline guard, not an estimated clock: it refuses late probes and stops owned foreground work at the limit. Unfinished checks stay visible in the report. Required plan checks remain outside the review/ship smoke budget. See QA deadlines for command, platform and cleanup limits.

Every ship also runs the existing documentation audit, including repeat ships and existing PR updates. Clear factual corrections join the final checked change; risky rewrites need approval. A failed audit stops for recovery or explicit acceptance of the named risk rather than silently dropping its result. Ship owns versioning, Git and PR publication; the docs helper does not commit or push independently.

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. Review, challenge, and consult modes. Available on every harness except Codex.
`/claude-code`	Second Opinion — independent code review from Claude Code. Review, challenge, and consult modes, with session continuity for consultation. Available on every harness except Claude Code.
`/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's own browser headed, 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. The visible face of the fallback engine; with Aside open you watch the agent's tabs there instead.
`/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-memorable`	Memorable recall bridge (opt-in, third party, Claude Code only) — connects Claude Code to the external Memorable CLI through gstack instead of the vendor's own installer, so the hook gets gstack's guarantees: an explicit consent key (`memorable_recall`, off by default, listed by `gstack-egress grants`), a fail-closed egress receipt for every prompt handed over (`gstack-egress list --sink memorable-recall`), a HIGH-tier secret pre-scan, a trust envelope and 8 KiB cap on whatever comes back, an allowlisted environment and process-group containment for the vendor process, and clean removal. `enable` registers the hook at the stable install with a 5 s timeout and never runs the vendor's own consent command; `disable` revokes the gate first and removes the entry by identity even after Claude Code strips the tag; `status` is read-only. gstack never installs Memorable, and what its binary sends is the vendor's claim, not gstack's. Not available on Windows yet. Full guide.
`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-review-log`	Review-pass receipts — `--start <skill>` captures the working-tree fingerprint before a diff review; `'<JSON>' --finish <token>` consumes that single-use, repository/branch/skill-scoped receipt. Binding requires matching start/end content and reviewer-reported `completed:true` and `converged:true`; it is not independent proof that a model read the source. `--check-shared-libs <token>` reads a current finding as JSON on stdin and checks prior Skip decisions against the actual branch, capture and eligible raw source blobs. It returns `reusable:false` when proof is missing or unsafe, including older records without logger-versioned coverage. Final review logging computes shared-code fingerprints and coverage rather than trusting supplied proof.
`gstack-review-read`	Review freshness — emits review records with computed `review_freshness.status` and `reason`: CURRENT, STALE, or UNVERIFIED for diff reviews. `/ship` and `/land-and-deploy` use the same grade; a matching commit alone never certifies a diff review. Dashboard rules.
`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.

The private paid CSO evaluation producer is a packaging contract, not an ordinary bun run build artifact. On macOS or Linux, a release operator compiles cso-eval-producer with the documented hardened Bun flags in the same clean build session as bun run build:cso, then installs it beside gstack-cso-launcher, gstack-cso-core, gstack-cso-watchdog, and the hidden .gstack-cso-generation manifest as one root-owned, nonwritable five-artifact unit. The producer rejects root execution, writable/symlinked/incomplete installations, and unreviewed provider CLI versions; each receipt binds all five artifact hashes, and collection rejects receipts from different unit identities. See the clean producer procedure. Paid producer evaluation remains unavailable on Windows because the detached watchdog has no Windows build.

Each producer gets a curated one-cell source copy with directories sealed to 0555 and files to 0444, plus pre/post content, Git, and mode checks. Claude receives that exact copy as a restricted read-only add-directory so its constrained launcher command can reach it. Gemini receives no source working directory or include-directory. Codex technically receives read-only filesystem access to the exact curated source root because the trusted helper inherits the Codex permission profile; its private provider work directory and exact cso-home artifact directory are the only write roots, every other root path remains denied, and the producer prompt requires source access through the helper. This is evaluation containment for an immutable public fixture, not a claim that Codex cannot directly read that fixture.

Copy each completed cell's receipt together with state/cso-home/security/cso/ to the trusted adjudication host. Receipt entries are sorted paths relative to that directory and bind every retained file's size and SHA-256 plus an aggregate inventory hash. Provider homes, settings, sessions, and credentials live under separate disposable directories and are removed after the cell; they are never part of the retained artifact tree. The adjudicator must re-hash the transported tree against the receipt before trusting reports or repair bundles.

Paid producer qualification uses this explicit host matrix:

Producer host	Daily/static cells	Comprehensive target execution
Codex CLI 0.153.4	Supported under the custom permission profile	Fails closed because Docker/socket access is not granted to the model command sandbox; report the setup gap as partial
Claude Code 2.1.263	Supported under restricted safe mode	Fails closed when the restricted launcher child cannot reach Docker; report the setup gap as partial
Gemini CLI 0.59.0	Supported with isolated home/settings	Private release qualification host: the exact `run_shell_command(<launcher>)` policy can run the trusted helper without exposing a general shell

Every setup-blocked comprehensive cell remains a miss in release-gate denominators. The evaluator does not silently count a host or workflow as supported when its containment policy prevents required setup.

./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.

Domain skills + raw CDP escape hatch

Two browser primitives in gstack's own engine (the fallback path when Aside isn't there) compound the 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 to browse/src/cdp-allowlist.ts with 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 cdp and harness can both attach to the same Chrome via Playwright's newCDPSession.

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.

Works with impeccable. If you use impeccable too, gstack does not fight it. gstack runs impeccable's deterministic engine as a pre-pass in /design-review, /review, /ship, and /design-html when you have it installed (gstack never runs impeccable's installer or launcher; the first time a design skill finds no engine it asks once whether to download the engine binary, checksum-pinned and logged, into ~/.impeccable, and remembers your answer), speaks the same 61 rule ids in its own voice, reads PRODUCT.md, writes DESIGN.md in the open DESIGN.md format both tools read, and hands deferred findings to /impeccable <command>. Say no and nothing changes: no nag, no missing step. gstack-config set design_detector off turns the pre-pass off. Attribution for the material gstack derived from impeccable and the DESIGN.md spec is in NOTICE.md.

/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. /qa creates native regressions when infrastructure is available and explicitly reports missing test coverage; CSS-only fixes may use browser evidence instead. 100% test coverage is the goal — tests make vibe coding safe instead of yolo coding.

/document-release is the engineer you never had. It audits relevant authored docs against the release diff and corrects factual drift before final verification. Risky changes return for approval. /ship invokes it on every run and owns TODOS, release metadata, generation and publication; the child reports updated, current or blocked documentation.

Aside is the browser gstack drives first. For browser surfaces, on a Mac with the Aside AI browser open, /qa, /qa-only, /design-review, /canary, /benchmark, /scrape, and /browse all run there — your real browser, with your real logged-in sessions, in tabs the agent opens for itself and closes when it's done. No cookie import, no "open the browser" step, no CAPTCHA handoff dance: hit a sign-in wall, sign in inside Aside, say "done", and the agent continues. Anything a page returns is treated as untrusted content — the agent takes syntax from it, never instructions. /make-pdf, /diagram, and design previews print and screenshot through Aside too (served from your machine on loopback, one render per script), and the planning skills do their web research through Aside's own agent before reaching for a search tool.

When Aside isn't there, gstack's own browser takes over — automatically. Linux, Windows, or a Mac with Aside closed: the same skills use the bundled headless Chromium that ./setup builds, produce the same evidence, and light up the features below that only make sense when the browser is gstack's rather than yours.

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. In Codex, gstack sends outside reviews to Claude Code through /claude-code. In Claude Code, /codex sends them to OpenAI Codex. Other harnesses expose both skills and use Codex where automatic outside reviews are supported. Each skill supports code review, adversarial challenge, and consultation with session continuity. Routing follows the harness, so changing your configured model does not change the outside reviewer. Reports identify the provider that actually completed each review; unavailable outside coverage remains visible.

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.

Aside

gstack never installed Aside, so it never uninstalls it. Keep it or remove it like any other app.

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 repo
read-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	How gstack drives Aside first (the contract, the cookbook, rendering, research), when the fallback engine kicks in, and the fallback's full `$B` command reference
Contributing	Dev setup, testing, contributor mode, and dev mode
Memorable recall bridge	Opt-in third-party workflow memory through gstack: two consents, what gstack hands over and can attest, removal, troubleshooting
Troubleshooting	Every `not run` / `unavailable` message, what it means, and the fix
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 off disables 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.jsonl before the send; sensitive sinks refuse to send at all if the receipt can't be written. Audit with gstack-egress list, verify the chain with gstack-egress verify (exit 3 on tamper), see the standing consent settings with gstack-egress grants. The ledger records attempted sends so accidents are auditable — it's an audit trail, not a network firewall.
Optional third-party bridges are off by default and receipted too. The one that exists today, the Memorable recall bridge, hands your prompt to a locally installed vendor binary only after you run gstack-memorable enable; every hand-off writes a receipt first, the consent shows up in gstack-egress grants, and what the vendor then sends is documented as the vendor's claim.

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

A message says not run, unavailable or names a fix? Look it up in docs/troubleshooting.md: every gate message gstack prints, what it means, what was kept, and the command that fixes it.

Skill not showing up? Run ./setup --status from your gstack checkout. It prints every install (host, scope, version, skills directory, source checkout) and, for a stale, missing or unregistered row, the exact command that fixes it. The usual fix is to re-run setup from that row's source for that host, e.g. cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setup (Claude) or cd ~/gstack && ./setup --host codex. A project install lives in the project's .claude/skills/gstack or .agents/skills/gstack; run its setup from inside the project.

/browse (or /qa, /design-review) says NEEDS_ASIDE or ASIDE_NOT_RUNNING? That's the probe telling you it's about to use the fallback browser. Want Aside? Open the app and sign in — aside --version should print a version and aside repl 'console.log("ok")' should print ok — then re-run. gstack never installs it for you. Want the fallback on purpose while Aside is open? GSTACK_SKIP_ASIDE=1 makes every skill, the renderer, and ./setup treat Aside as absent. When Aside is absent the probe prints NEEDS_ASIDE: <OS> and skills trust that line for the macOS-only download pitch; GSTACK_PLATFORM overrides the OS it names, for tests and unusual hosts (set it in your shell — gstack never reads it from a project .env).

/browse fails on the fallback browser? cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && bun install && bun run build

/make-pdf or /diagram can't render? Same two paths: with Aside open they print through Aside (bun run ~/.claude/skills/gstack/bin/gstack-render.ts some.html --screenshot /tmp/out.png tests it directly, and its first line, ENGINE=aside or ENGINE=browse, names the browser that actually rendered); without it they use the bundled browser, so bun run build is the fix.

Stale install? Run /gstack-upgrade — or set auto_upgrade: true in ~/.gstack/config.yaml. On Codex and the other non-Claude hosts, upgrade from a terminal: find the checkout in the source column of ./setup --status, then cd <source> && git pull && ./setup --host <host>, and start a new session.

Typing into a specific field with the fallback browser? browse type --selector '<css>' <text> types into that element; bare browse type <text> types into whatever has focus.

State in the wrong place, or a setting that won't stick? ~/.claude/skills/gstack/bin/gstack-paths --explain shows which directory gstack uses for its state and why. See docs/state-root.md.

Want shorter commands? cd ~/.claude/skills/gstack && ./setup --no-prefix — switches from /gstack-qa to /qa. Your choice is remembered for future upgrades.

Don't use some skills? gstack-config set disabled_skills make-pdf,pair-agent stops registering them on every host, so their descriptions stop loading into each session. Claude Code updates right away; other hosts on their next ./setup --host <name> or /gstack-upgrade. Their files stay installed, so a skill that calls a disabled one still works (you get a warning). Typos are rejected with the closest skill name, gstack-upgrade can't be disabled, and gstack-config set disabled_skills "" re-enables everything.

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. ${CODEX_HOME:-~/.codex}/skills/gstack is a runtime directory, not the checkout: ./setup --status shows the Codex row's source checkout. Fix: cd <that source> && git pull && ./setup --host codex — for a repo-local install, run it from inside the project.

Windows users: gstack works on Windows 11 via Git Bash or WSL. Aside is macOS-only, so on Windows (and Linux) the browser skills, /make-pdf, and /diagram always use gstack's bundled browser. 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. Native /cso additionally requires Windows PowerShell and Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools with the Desktop development with C++ workload; setup leaves that skill explicitly unavailable when they are absent.

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 bundled browser is best-effort: setup records the reason, finishes registering every skill, and prints which skills are affected (/qa, /qa-only, /design-review, /browse, make-pdf, /diagram, /pair-agent). With Aside open, the browser skills keep running in Aside and only the fallback engine is missing; /pair-agent always needs the bundled browser. 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  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, /deslop-shared-libs, /test-audit, /ship, /land-and-deploy,
/canary, /benchmark, /browse, /open-gstack-browser, /qa, /qa-only, /design-review, /scrape,
/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.

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gstack

Quick start

Install — about 30 seconds

Step 1: Install on your machine

Step 2: Team mode — auto-update for shared repos (recommended)

OpenClaw

Native OpenClaw Skills (via ClawHub)

Other AI Agents

See it work

The sprint

QA without a webpage

Which review should I use?

Power tools

Standalone binaries

Domain skills + raw CDP escape hatch

Karpathy's four failure modes? Already covered.

Parallel sprints

10-15 parallel sprints

Voice input (AquaVoice, Whisper, etc.)

Uninstall

Option 1: Run the uninstall script

Option 2: Manual removal (no local repo)

Clean up CLAUDE.md

Playwright

Aside

GBrain — persistent knowledge for your coding agent

Docs

Privacy & Telemetry

Troubleshooting

License

77 KiB

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