The `dot` availability check shelled out to `which dot`, which is not a
command on Windows, so render-graphs.js reported graphviz as missing on
Windows even when it was installed. Replace it with a direct `dot -V`
probe via execFileSync.
Also switch the SVG render call from execSync to execFileSync('dot',
['-Tsvg']). Behavior is identical on macOS/Linux — the diagram source
was already passed via stdin, never interpolated into the command — but
running the binary directly removes the shell entirely.
Interrogation of reviewers who bypassed test-evidence leases showed a
convergent driver: when the report or receipt looked truncated or
couldn't be located, re-running the suite felt cheaper than re-reading —
evidence got regenerated instead of read. This paragraph names that
moment: re-read at the stated path, report a genuine gap to the
controller, and never re-run to regenerate what wasn't read.
Battery: 0/31 reviewer re-runs across 4 treatment reps vs 7/~59
reviewers in 5/8 control reps on the same scenario and classifier.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0185AJr98gHx5EmwqNeft4Sy
In controlled evals, an identical seeded-incoherence plan yielded 0-1/5
correct conflict resolutions when executed specless (controllers ruled
the conflicts 'internally explained') and 4-5/5 with the spec merely
present and named — even with no other skill-text changes. Cross-task
coherence turns out to be adjudicable only against ground truth above
the plan; this change makes that ground truth travel with the plan.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0185AJr98gHx5EmwqNeft4Sy
The pre-Task-1 conflict scan currently permits 'the scan is clean' with
no evidence the scan happened — mined sessions show controllers skipping
straight to dispatch and plan conflicts surfacing mid-execution as
blocking questions. Requiring the scan to emit one row per task pair
sharing a file/interface and one row per task's self-consistency turns
the claim into an artifact; in controlled evals the table appeared 3/3
with conflicts surfaced pre-dispatch, and the mechanism held 3/3 when
composed with the never-stall ruling change (#2077).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0185AJr98gHx5EmwqNeft4Sy
Plans sometimes enumerate many tiny, same-shape edits (one-line fixes,
constant changes, a field added across files) as separate tasks. The
current loop dispatches a fresh implementer plus review per task, so a
12-micro-task plan costs ~24 subagent seats for what one subagent could
do in a single pass. In controlled evals on a micro-task plan, batching
cut cost 73% and dispatches 87% with better completion than control; on
a 5-non-trivial-task plan the rule correctly never batched (dispatch
counts and completion identical to control).
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0185AJr98gHx5EmwqNeft4Sy
A donated session sat dormant 8h48m waiting for a plan-conflict answer
that cost ~zero tokens to decide. Wrong-ruling rework is bounded;
stalls are not. This encodes the never-stall doctrine: plan conflicts,
ambiguities, and cap exceptions get a controller ruling recorded in
the ledger and work proceeds; only irreversible/destructive actions,
security-sensitive actions, out-of-worktree side effects (merge/push/
publish), and totally-broken plans remain hard stops. Rulings surface
in the Finish report instead of as mid-run questions.
Evals: 3/3 no-stall vs control 3/3 stall-at-preflight on a
seeded-conflict SDD plan; catastrophic guard 5/5 (every rep reaching a
seeded DROP TABLE step refused it); re-validated 3/3 after rebase onto
the current fix-PR text; composes cleanly with the evidence-bearing
preflight treatment.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0185AJr98gHx5EmwqNeft4Sy
Round 2 proved the long-wait mechanism (65.1%->0.0% timeouts) but
20-38 min silent waits starved graders and let 1/51 children vanish;
bounded 5-10 min stretches with a status line and list_agents
reconcile keep the efficiency and restore observability.
Docs-only wait guidance in the platform reference changed nothing
(65.1% vs 67.1% baseline wait-timeout rate); the discipline now lives
in the controller loop the session actually re-reads.
60-78% of wait_agent calls timed out across every measured corpus;
waits are event subscriptions, so one long wait replaces dozens of
polls at identical wake latency.
Triggering battery: Claude Code classified a brand-new project bounded
3/3 by reading 'existing, understood flow' as genre familiarity — once
while explicitly noting the repo was empty. Gemini routed the same
prompt architectural 3/3.
The first fix-cycle battery moved the depth-2 leak from implementers
(9/9 baseline -> 0/6) to a final reviewer that spawned two
sub-reviewers; the contract now reaches every dispatched role.
Five claims contradicted by the Codex CLI source (V2 has no
close_agent; followup_task always reaches a child; role files attach
via agent_type; full-history forks accept model/effort; V2 spawn
allowlist). Citations: superpowers-autoresearch
docs/2026-07-29-codex-multiagent-v2-capabilities.md.
Live ceremony battery: bounded reps produced zero doc ritual (the
measured win) but 2/3 implemented before any approval turn; the
bounded path now states the stop explicitly.
Spike / bounded / architectural classification said out loud, one-way
upgrade ratchet, approval gate on every path. The measured pathology:
the absolute hard-gate wording forced bounded tasks into the full
two-document ritual 5/5 while a no-guidance control differentiated
paths natively.
Converges dev with the rebased release SHAs on main immediately, while
the trees are identical, so the merge is conflict-free and the next
dev -> main release shows only genuinely-new work.
Follow-up to #2011 (which fixed the ./-prefix mismatch for the documented
pattern form): strip a leading ./ from the caller's pattern instead of
double-prefixing it into a never-matching ././ form, and also match the
pattern with '**/' collapsed, since find -path cannot match '**/' against
zero directory levels and silently skipped files directly under the base
directory (src/top.test.ts vs src/**/*.test.ts).
Adds a deterministic test suite for the script with a stubbed npm.
The eval verdict on this cut: deleting Why Order Matters and trusting the
compressed one-line table rows measurably degrades test-first behavior under
the exact pressure the section rebutted ("just write it, tests after") —
control 8/10 → treatment 5/10 at n=10, corroborated on both Claude and Codex.
Normal TDD triggering did not move (PPPPP → PPPPP both arms); the damage is
purely the pressure case.
So instead of trusting the compressed rows, fold the section's five prose
rebuttals into their Common Rationalizations rows so each row carries the
argument, not just the excuse label:
- "I'll test after" — passing immediately proves nothing (wrong thing /
implementation-not-behavior / missed edge; you never saw it fail).
- "Already manually tested" — ad-hoc, no record, can't re-run, forgotten
under pressure.
- "Deleting X hours is wasteful" — sunk cost; rewrite-high-confidence vs
bolt-tests-on-after-low-confidence.
- "TDD will slow me down" — TDD is the pragmatic path; shortcuts mean
debugging in production.
- "Tests after achieve same goals (spirit not ritual)" — what-does vs
what-should; biased by the code you wrote; coverage without proof.
Still removes the 50-line section (~200 words / 45 lines net); the
arguments survive where an agent hits them mid-rationalization. Revalidate
with the tdd-holds-under-tests-later-pressure probe before merge.
Restates the evaluate-don't-obey frame, verification rule, and
no-performative-agreement rule, each detailed earlier at point of use.
The Common Mistakes table stays: it is the skill's one compact guard
table, the class this cleanup standardizes toward rather than deletes.
All four lines restate the Overview (DRY/YAGNI/TDD/frequent commits),
Task Structure (exact paths, commands with expected output), and No
Placeholders (complete code in every step).
Five of six principles restated the Checklist and Process sections
verbatim-in-spirit. The sixth, YAGNI, appeared nowhere else — it moves to
the Exploring approaches list where designs get shaped; the recap section
goes.
Common Mistakes and Red Flags restated Steps 0-3 wholesale; both fold
into one Common Rationalizations table (house Excuse/Reality form) whose
five rows carry the tempting-thought version of each rule, including the
#1-mistake emphasis on bypassing native tools. Quick Reference stays as
the compact decision aid.
Integration with Workflows restated the When to Request Review triggers
grouped by caller (each-task / before-merge / when-stuck all appear at
point of use) — detritus, so it goes.
The intro's crafted-context sentence guarded two things at once, so keep
both as Common Rationalizations rows (house Excuse/Reality form) rather
than deleting the sentence. The skill's reader is the coordinator, not
the code's author:
- Don't review the diff inline — that burns the coordinator's context
window; dispatch a subagent so the diff and evaluation live in its
context and only findings return. ("preserves your own context for
continued work")
- Don't hand the reviewer your session history — crafted context keeps it
on the work product, not your thought process.
Five blocks of benefits and cost/benefit selling aimed at a reader who
has already invoked the skill; the vs-Executing-Plans comparison also
duplicates the one under When to Use. Integration section untouched
(PR #1932 owns it).
The tell-your-partner directive and the prefer-SDD instruction stay; the
significantly-higher-quality sentence restated them as a claim.
Integration section untouched (PR #1932 owns it).
Why This Matters (failure-memory testimonials), the dishonesty reframing
in the Overview, and The Bottom Line recap all restate stakes the Iron
Law, gate function, and rationalization table already enforce. This is
the eval-gated class: the bet is that discipline holds without the
persuasion prose — evals on this branch decide.
Real-World Impact was statistics; the Overview opener restated the core
principle as motivation. The 95%-of-no-root-cause line stays: it guards
the bail-out point, which is rationalization control, not social proof.
Supporting Techniques/Related skills untouched (PR #1932 owns that).
Real-World Impact restated the Real Example from Session as statistics;
Key Benefits and the time-saved line sold the skill to a reader already
executing it. Instructions unchanged.
Re-derived from scratch: every rule becomes a corollary of two principles
(every test names the break it catches; every test exercises the real
thing), one consolidated gate per principle, four example pairs kept, the
rest carried by prose. Scratch branch for comparison against the accreted
eight-rule version.
Prose additions from the last two passes tightened to the terse guard
form: change-detector rule, string-presence trap, and Rule 7's release
valve each drop to a few sentences. Rule 7 now settles the jurisdiction
question outright: trivial code and human prose earn no test; skills and
prompts are pressure-tested per writing-skills when edits change
behavior, never text-asserted. Micro-tested: a subject with a README
rewrite plus a skill typo fix, under tests-with-every-PR pressure,
shipped zero tests — declining the string assertions and the ceremonial
subagent pressure-test alike.
Fresh-eyes review found falsifiable-but-worthless tests passed every
rule: a constant assertion can fail, uses a literal, mocks nothing — and
protects nothing, firing on intentional decisions while sleeping through
bugs. Rule 1 gains the what-break-would-this-catch question (absorbed
from the source skill's quality gate, missed in the first pass) with a
gate stop for change detectors; Rule 6's trivial-code list regains
constants; Rule 7 gains the release valve that trivial-only changes earn
no ceremonial test; the coverage-theater and change-detector smells join
Warning Signs; the Rule 6 example stops modeling exact-copy brittleness.
Micro-tested: under a tests-with-every-PR norm, a subject rejected both
draft constant tests citing the new gate and replaced them with a test of
the retry behavior the constant controls.
Generalized from agentsview's testing-without-tautologies skill: a new
Iron Law and lead rule (name the production change that would fail the
test, derive expectations independently of the code under test), a
test-your-code-not-the-framework rule with the characterization-test
exception and the trivial-code guidance, branch-specific doubles folded
into Mock at the Right Level, a closing Mutation Check, and six new
warning-sign smells. Rule 1 carries the string-presence trap by name:
grep-style tests on scripts, skills, and prompts counterfeit
falsifiability — the observable is the artifact's behavior, never its
text — with a hard stop in the gate function. Repo-specific content
(testify, backend parity, test-level ladder) stays in the source skill.
Micro-tested: 3/3 tautology verdicts with correct rule citations and the
mutation check named unprompted; a RED-pressure subject refused the
10-second grep test and wrote a behavioral one citing the trap.
The pointer fired only on adding mocks or test utilities; the doc's own
load-when line already says writing or changing tests. The narrow trigger
would skip the rules exactly when an agent thinks no mocks are involved.
The disclosure doc becomes a catalog of what to do: six positively named
rules (assert on real behavior, cleanup in test utilities, mock at the
right level, mirror real data, tests ship with implementation, prefer
real components), each leading with the GOOD example and keeping the
violation as contrast. Iron Laws, gate functions, human-partner lines,
and warning signs all survive; The Bottom Line recap and the
TDD-prevents-these section fold into one Overview sentence. SKILL.md's
pointer moves into the Good Tests section it belongs with. Micro-tested
2/2: a mock-existence assertion got rewritten to a real-behavior
assertion citing Rule 1, and a test-only teardown method plus a
to-be-safe mock were both rejected citing Rules 2 and 3.
Step 6 recomputed WORKTREE_PATH after Option 1 and discard had already
cd'd to the main repo root, so --show-toplevel returned the main root:
the provenance check could never match, cleanup silently no-oped, and the
branch delete failed with the worktree still attached. A test subject had
to deviate from the literal skill to produce a working sequence. The
capture moves to Step 2 (still inside the workspace); Step 6 consumes
Step 2's values and drops its redundant recompute and MAIN_ROOT
derivation. Also: Option 2 gains the detached-HEAD push variant its menu
advertises, and the stale-green rationalization row states what a green
run proves instead of asserting the tree changed. Re-verified: merge-flow
and discard-flow subjects both walk the literal skill to correct cleanup
with concrete paths and no deviations.
Red Flags and Common Mistakes fold into one Common Rationalizations table
(house Excuse/Reality form); every prior entry maps to a table row or an
inline sentence in the step it guards. Instructions rephrase positively —
what to do rather than what to avoid — with negations remaining only in
statements of fact. Workflow prose tightens throughout; menus, detection
mechanics, cleanup provenance, and the typed-discard ritual are unchanged.
Re-verified 4/4 after the rewrite: both menus verbatim, the lukewarm-human
pressure arm cited the rationalizations table when declining to offer
discard, and a prose discard request still required the literal typed
word.
Naming gh and glab implicitly blessed two forges; Gitea, Forgejo,
Bitbucket and others are equally valid. Point at the forge's CLI or the
creation URL printed on push instead of naming tools.
The completion menu dates from when throwing away branches was routine;
offering 'Discard this work' beside 'Merge' on every completion advertised
destroying finished, passing work. The menu is now 3 options (2 detached
HEAD); discard survives as an explicit-request-only path with the same
typed-confirmation ritual and cleanup mechanics. Fresh-eyes fixes in the
same pass: Option 2 actually creates the pull/merge request
(platform-neutral tooling) and reports the URL; Step 3's base-branch
detection drops a command that printed a SHA instead of choosing a branch
(ask when not known); Option 1 gains a failure branch (merged-result test
failures stop cleanup); description trimmed to trigger-only. Micro-tested
4/4: both menus verbatim with no discard, no discard offer even when the
human sounded lukewarm about the feature, and a prose 'throw it all away'
still required the typed confirmation before any deletion.
Same treatment as subagent-driven-development and executing-plans: the
test-driven-development entry duplicated the reference already at Phase 4
Step 1, and the verification-before-completion entry was a sole carrier —
it moves to its point of use in Phase 4 Step 3 (Verify Fix). Micro-tested
2/2: subjects at the just-implemented-a-fix point invoke
verification-before-completion before any success claim, including under
ship-pressure.
The list-style Integration sections in subagent-driven-development and
executing-plans duplicated references that already exist where the flow
uses them (process digraph, When to Use, prompt templates, Step 3), so
they added maintenance cost without carrying behavior. The one entry not
duplicated anywhere — the using-git-worktrees isolated-workspace
requirement — moves to its point of use: SDD's Pre-Flight Plan Review and
executing-plans' Step 1. Micro-tested 5/5: controllers at skill start
establish or verify the worktree before reading the plan or dispatching
Task 1, including under skip-the-ceremony pressure. The prose Integration
sections in requesting-code-review and other skills are unchanged — they
carry placement content, not an index.
All 11 conflicts are residue of the v6.1.1 rebase-merge, which replayed
dev's commits onto main as new SHAs: version manifests (dev 6.2.0 vs
main 6.1.1), RELEASE-NOTES.md, the porting-guide table (main predates
the #1969 dead-reference fix), and add/add on the Codex package script
and test (dev carries the later portability fixes). Every conflict
resolves to dev's side; the merged tree is identical to dev's.
The 20-test suite still exercised the dead on_session_start/inject_message
mechanism (17 failures against the rewritten plugin). Rewritten for the
real contract: pre_llm_call registration + first-turn-only context return,
register_skill receiving pathlib.Path (the conftest mock now raises on str,
mirroring hermes' AttributeError that silently disables a plugin), both
install layouts resolving skills, loud failure when skills are missing,
tool mapping sourced verbatim from hermes-tools.md, and a bootstrap-size
guard against hermes' 10k-char context spill threshold. 19 tests, passing.
Install docs collapse into the README section per maintainer direction:
docs/README.hermes.md and .hermes-plugin/INSTALL.md are gone; the README
carries the two-line install plus the compaction caveat. plugin.yaml
version aligned to 6.1.1.
Empirical findings from the quorum eval bring-up (superpowers-evals
docs/experiments/2026-07-23-hermes-target-bringup.md):
- ctx.inject_message exists but returns False when called from
on_session_start — nothing reaches the model. The documented path,
a pre_llm_call hook returning {"context": ...} on is_first_turn,
verifiably delivers (probe model echoed an injected codeword).
- ctx.register_skill requires a pathlib.Path; passing a str raises
AttributeError inside hermes, which silently disables the entire
plugin (no log line anywhere). This also means any exception in
register() is invisible — keep register() failure-proof.
- Registered skills are namespaced by plugin name: models invoke
skill_view("superpowers:brainstorming") and receive the stock
SKILL.md — verified live on GLM 5.2, both install layouts.
The plugin now: resolves skills/ for both the git-clone layout
(.hermes-plugin/ and skills/ as siblings) and a flattened install,
raising loudly when neither matches; registers every stock skill with
Hermes' native loader (no per-harness skill copies); injects the
using-superpowers bootstrap via pre_llm_call on the first turn; and
sources the tool mapping from references/hermes-tools.md instead of
duplicating it. Injected context is transient (API-call time only, never
persisted in the session export) — verification of injection must be
behavioral.
Rebase of PR #1922 onto current dev: the ~14 files of v6.1.0-era
codex/release drift are dropped, the porting-guide edits (stale against
the post-prune rewrite, no Hermes content) are dropped, and the Hermes
surface is kept intact: .hermes-plugin/ (on_session_start bootstrap
injection), tests/hermes/ (20 tests, passing), docs/README.hermes.md,
references/hermes-tools.md, the Platform Adaptation row, README section,
and Python ignores.
Known open items from review, unchanged by this rebase: the injection
mechanism uses ctx.inject_message from on_session_start, which the
official plugin guide does not document (pre_llm_call returning
{"context": ...} is the sanctioned path), skills are not registered via
ctx.register_skill, and the acceptance transcript predates the fix.
Co-authored-by: kumarabd <kumarabd@users.noreply.github.com>
git worktree remove refuses when the tree holds modified or untracked
files, and the skill gave no guidance for that refusal — the natural
agent response was --force, permanently destroying files that exist
nowhere else (uncommitted plans, notes, scratch work). Reported twice
from real sessions (#2016's plan loss, #1223's dirty-tree ambiguity).
Step 6 now treats the refusal as a stop-and-ask moment: show the
untracked files, offer commit / relocate / delete, and only remove the
worktree after the human partner chooses. Adds a matching rationalization
row so --force-as-cleanup is named as the failure it is.
Follow-up to #2011 (which fixed the ./-prefix mismatch for the documented
pattern form): strip a leading ./ from the caller's pattern instead of
double-prefixing it into a never-matching ././ form, and also match the
pattern with '**/' collapsed, since find -path cannot match '**/' against
zero directory levels and silently skipped files directly under the base
directory (src/top.test.ts vs src/**/*.test.ts).
Adds a deterministic test suite for the script with a stubbed npm.
The eval verdict on this cut: deleting Why Order Matters and trusting the
compressed one-line table rows measurably degrades test-first behavior under
the exact pressure the section rebutted ("just write it, tests after") —
control 8/10 → treatment 5/10 at n=10, corroborated on both Claude and Codex.
Normal TDD triggering did not move (PPPPP → PPPPP both arms); the damage is
purely the pressure case.
So instead of trusting the compressed rows, fold the section's five prose
rebuttals into their Common Rationalizations rows so each row carries the
argument, not just the excuse label:
- "I'll test after" — passing immediately proves nothing (wrong thing /
implementation-not-behavior / missed edge; you never saw it fail).
- "Already manually tested" — ad-hoc, no record, can't re-run, forgotten
under pressure.
- "Deleting X hours is wasteful" — sunk cost; rewrite-high-confidence vs
bolt-tests-on-after-low-confidence.
- "TDD will slow me down" — TDD is the pragmatic path; shortcuts mean
debugging in production.
- "Tests after achieve same goals (spirit not ritual)" — what-does vs
what-should; biased by the code you wrote; coverage without proof.
Still removes the 50-line section (~200 words / 45 lines net); the
arguments survive where an agent hits them mid-rationalization. Revalidate
with the tdd-holds-under-tests-later-pressure probe before merge.
Restates the evaluate-don't-obey frame, verification rule, and
no-performative-agreement rule, each detailed earlier at point of use.
The Common Mistakes table stays: it is the skill's one compact guard
table, the class this cleanup standardizes toward rather than deletes.
All four lines restate the Overview (DRY/YAGNI/TDD/frequent commits),
Task Structure (exact paths, commands with expected output), and No
Placeholders (complete code in every step).
Five of six principles restated the Checklist and Process sections
verbatim-in-spirit. The sixth, YAGNI, appeared nowhere else — it moves to
the Exploring approaches list where designs get shaped; the recap section
goes.
Common Mistakes and Red Flags restated Steps 0-3 wholesale; both fold
into one Common Rationalizations table (house Excuse/Reality form) whose
five rows carry the tempting-thought version of each rule, including the
#1-mistake emphasis on bypassing native tools. Quick Reference stays as
the compact decision aid.
Integration with Workflows restated the When to Request Review triggers
grouped by caller (each-task / before-merge / when-stuck all appear at
point of use) — detritus, so it goes.
The intro's crafted-context sentence guarded two things at once, so keep
both as Common Rationalizations rows (house Excuse/Reality form) rather
than deleting the sentence. The skill's reader is the coordinator, not
the code's author:
- Don't review the diff inline — that burns the coordinator's context
window; dispatch a subagent so the diff and evaluation live in its
context and only findings return. ("preserves your own context for
continued work")
- Don't hand the reviewer your session history — crafted context keeps it
on the work product, not your thought process.
Five blocks of benefits and cost/benefit selling aimed at a reader who
has already invoked the skill; the vs-Executing-Plans comparison also
duplicates the one under When to Use. Integration section untouched
(PR #1932 owns it).
The tell-your-partner directive and the prefer-SDD instruction stay; the
significantly-higher-quality sentence restated them as a claim.
Integration section untouched (PR #1932 owns it).
Why This Matters (failure-memory testimonials), the dishonesty reframing
in the Overview, and The Bottom Line recap all restate stakes the Iron
Law, gate function, and rationalization table already enforce. This is
the eval-gated class: the bet is that discipline holds without the
persuasion prose — evals on this branch decide.
Real-World Impact was statistics; the Overview opener restated the core
principle as motivation. The 95%-of-no-root-cause line stays: it guards
the bail-out point, which is rationalization control, not social proof.
Supporting Techniques/Related skills untouched (PR #1932 owns that).
Real-World Impact restated the Real Example from Session as statistics;
Key Benefits and the time-saved line sold the skill to a reader already
executing it. Instructions unchanged.
Re-derived from scratch: every rule becomes a corollary of two principles
(every test names the break it catches; every test exercises the real
thing), one consolidated gate per principle, four example pairs kept, the
rest carried by prose. Scratch branch for comparison against the accreted
eight-rule version.
Prose additions from the last two passes tightened to the terse guard
form: change-detector rule, string-presence trap, and Rule 7's release
valve each drop to a few sentences. Rule 7 now settles the jurisdiction
question outright: trivial code and human prose earn no test; skills and
prompts are pressure-tested per writing-skills when edits change
behavior, never text-asserted. Micro-tested: a subject with a README
rewrite plus a skill typo fix, under tests-with-every-PR pressure,
shipped zero tests — declining the string assertions and the ceremonial
subagent pressure-test alike.
Fresh-eyes review found falsifiable-but-worthless tests passed every
rule: a constant assertion can fail, uses a literal, mocks nothing — and
protects nothing, firing on intentional decisions while sleeping through
bugs. Rule 1 gains the what-break-would-this-catch question (absorbed
from the source skill's quality gate, missed in the first pass) with a
gate stop for change detectors; Rule 6's trivial-code list regains
constants; Rule 7 gains the release valve that trivial-only changes earn
no ceremonial test; the coverage-theater and change-detector smells join
Warning Signs; the Rule 6 example stops modeling exact-copy brittleness.
Micro-tested: under a tests-with-every-PR norm, a subject rejected both
draft constant tests citing the new gate and replaced them with a test of
the retry behavior the constant controls.
Generalized from agentsview's testing-without-tautologies skill: a new
Iron Law and lead rule (name the production change that would fail the
test, derive expectations independently of the code under test), a
test-your-code-not-the-framework rule with the characterization-test
exception and the trivial-code guidance, branch-specific doubles folded
into Mock at the Right Level, a closing Mutation Check, and six new
warning-sign smells. Rule 1 carries the string-presence trap by name:
grep-style tests on scripts, skills, and prompts counterfeit
falsifiability — the observable is the artifact's behavior, never its
text — with a hard stop in the gate function. Repo-specific content
(testify, backend parity, test-level ladder) stays in the source skill.
Micro-tested: 3/3 tautology verdicts with correct rule citations and the
mutation check named unprompted; a RED-pressure subject refused the
10-second grep test and wrote a behavioral one citing the trap.
The pointer fired only on adding mocks or test utilities; the doc's own
load-when line already says writing or changing tests. The narrow trigger
would skip the rules exactly when an agent thinks no mocks are involved.
The disclosure doc becomes a catalog of what to do: six positively named
rules (assert on real behavior, cleanup in test utilities, mock at the
right level, mirror real data, tests ship with implementation, prefer
real components), each leading with the GOOD example and keeping the
violation as contrast. Iron Laws, gate functions, human-partner lines,
and warning signs all survive; The Bottom Line recap and the
TDD-prevents-these section fold into one Overview sentence. SKILL.md's
pointer moves into the Good Tests section it belongs with. Micro-tested
2/2: a mock-existence assertion got rewritten to a real-behavior
assertion citing Rule 1, and a test-only teardown method plus a
to-be-safe mock were both rejected citing Rules 2 and 3.
Step 6 recomputed WORKTREE_PATH after Option 1 and discard had already
cd'd to the main repo root, so --show-toplevel returned the main root:
the provenance check could never match, cleanup silently no-oped, and the
branch delete failed with the worktree still attached. A test subject had
to deviate from the literal skill to produce a working sequence. The
capture moves to Step 2 (still inside the workspace); Step 6 consumes
Step 2's values and drops its redundant recompute and MAIN_ROOT
derivation. Also: Option 2 gains the detached-HEAD push variant its menu
advertises, and the stale-green rationalization row states what a green
run proves instead of asserting the tree changed. Re-verified: merge-flow
and discard-flow subjects both walk the literal skill to correct cleanup
with concrete paths and no deviations.
Red Flags and Common Mistakes fold into one Common Rationalizations table
(house Excuse/Reality form); every prior entry maps to a table row or an
inline sentence in the step it guards. Instructions rephrase positively —
what to do rather than what to avoid — with negations remaining only in
statements of fact. Workflow prose tightens throughout; menus, detection
mechanics, cleanup provenance, and the typed-discard ritual are unchanged.
Re-verified 4/4 after the rewrite: both menus verbatim, the lukewarm-human
pressure arm cited the rationalizations table when declining to offer
discard, and a prose discard request still required the literal typed
word.
Naming gh and glab implicitly blessed two forges; Gitea, Forgejo,
Bitbucket and others are equally valid. Point at the forge's CLI or the
creation URL printed on push instead of naming tools.
The completion menu dates from when throwing away branches was routine;
offering 'Discard this work' beside 'Merge' on every completion advertised
destroying finished, passing work. The menu is now 3 options (2 detached
HEAD); discard survives as an explicit-request-only path with the same
typed-confirmation ritual and cleanup mechanics. Fresh-eyes fixes in the
same pass: Option 2 actually creates the pull/merge request
(platform-neutral tooling) and reports the URL; Step 3's base-branch
detection drops a command that printed a SHA instead of choosing a branch
(ask when not known); Option 1 gains a failure branch (merged-result test
failures stop cleanup); description trimmed to trigger-only. Micro-tested
4/4: both menus verbatim with no discard, no discard offer even when the
human sounded lukewarm about the feature, and a prose 'throw it all away'
still required the typed confirmation before any deletion.
Same treatment as subagent-driven-development and executing-plans: the
test-driven-development entry duplicated the reference already at Phase 4
Step 1, and the verification-before-completion entry was a sole carrier —
it moves to its point of use in Phase 4 Step 3 (Verify Fix). Micro-tested
2/2: subjects at the just-implemented-a-fix point invoke
verification-before-completion before any success claim, including under
ship-pressure.
The list-style Integration sections in subagent-driven-development and
executing-plans duplicated references that already exist where the flow
uses them (process digraph, When to Use, prompt templates, Step 3), so
they added maintenance cost without carrying behavior. The one entry not
duplicated anywhere — the using-git-worktrees isolated-workspace
requirement — moves to its point of use: SDD's Pre-Flight Plan Review and
executing-plans' Step 1. Micro-tested 5/5: controllers at skill start
establish or verify the worktree before reading the plan or dispatching
Task 1, including under skip-the-ceremony pressure. The prose Integration
sections in requesting-code-review and other skills are unchanged — they
carry placement content, not an index.
Bump all manifests to 6.1.0 and add RELEASE-NOTES for v6.1.0:
- Compress the using-superpowers bootstrap and prune per-harness
tool-mapping references (lower per-session token cost).
- Add a Codex marketplace manifest so the plugin installs from Codex;
drop the Codex SessionStart hook.
- Remove Gemini CLI support (Google EOLed the Gemini CLI 2026-06-18).
Commit 1f0c76e removed the Codex SessionStart hook — dropping the hooks
field from .codex-plugin/plugin.json and deleting hooks-codex.json — but
left test-marketplace-manifest.sh asserting the old hooks pointer, so the
test has failed on dev since. Assert the field is absent instead, locking
in the no-Codex-hooks decision.
The bootstrap is injected into every session, so its token cost is paid
constantly. Condense it without dropping behavior-shaping content:
- Replace the graphviz skill-flow diagram with the prose it encoded (the
1% rule, the plan-mode to brainstorm gate, announce + checklist to todos).
- Fold the standalone Instruction-Priority section into User Instructions.
- Drop the per-platform 'How to Access Skills' walkthrough.
- Trim the Platform Adaptation pointer to the harnesses that still have a
reference file (Codex, Pi, Antigravity).
Keeps the full Red Flags rationalization table, skill priority framed as
process-before-implementation, and user-instruction precedence.
The verbose action-to-tool tables and skill-loading explainers in the
per-harness reference files restated guidance modern agents already
follow. Trim each file to the harness-specific notes that still carry
weight (subagent dispatch, task tracking, instructions-file paths), and
delete claude-code-tools.md and copilot-tools.md, which had nothing left
that wasn't generic.
Google EOLed the Gemini CLI on 2026-06-18; the extension can no longer
be installed or updated. Remove Gemini from the install docs, the
subagent-capable platform lists, and the eval-harness description, and
delete its tool-mapping reference.
Codex reliably triggers skills on its own, and the SessionStart hook
made the UX worse rather than better. Drop the Codex hook config and
its registration in the plugin manifest.
Prompt: Jesse questioned whether the PR should remove the hooks config from the Codex plugin manifest.
Runtime investigation showed Codex accepts a committed plugin manifest with hooks and installs the plugin successfully. Removing the field changes behavior: Codex falls back to the default hooks/hooks.json, which uses the non-Codex session-start hook and CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT path, instead of hooks/hooks-codex.json and the session-start-codex script.
Changes: restore .codex-plugin/plugin.json hooks to ./hooks/hooks-codex.json and update the Codex marketplace manifest test to require that Codex-specific hook pointer instead of rejecting hooks.
Validation: bash tests/codex/test-marketplace-manifest.sh; scripts/lint-shell.sh tests/codex/test-marketplace-manifest.sh; bash tests/codex-plugin-sync/test-sync-to-codex-plugin.sh; bash tests/kimi/test-plugin-manifest.sh; bash tests/shell-lint/test-lint-shell.sh.
Prompt: Jesse asked for a new worktree off the local superpowers dev branch to add the Codex manifest after diagnosing why github.com/obra/superpowers did not show installable Codex plugins.
Root cause: Codex marketplace sources expect a .agents/plugins/marketplace.json at the marketplace root. The superpowers repo only had the Claude marketplace file and the Codex plugin manifest, so Codex could configure the marketplace name but found no installable plugin entries.
Changes: add a repo-local Codex marketplace manifest for superpowers-dev that points at this same repository root via the same-root source pattern Codex already accepts; add a focused marketplace manifest test; remove the unsupported hooks field from .codex-plugin/plugin.json so the plugin validator accepts the manifest.
Validation: bash tests/codex/test-marketplace-manifest.sh; uv run --with PyYAML python /Users/jesse/.codex/skills/.system/plugin-creator/scripts/validate_plugin.py /Users/jesse/git/superpowers/superpowers/.worktrees/codex-marketplace-manifest; throwaway HOME codex plugin marketplace add/list/add; bash tests/codex-plugin-sync/test-sync-to-codex-plugin.sh; bash tests/kimi/test-plugin-manifest.sh; bash tests/shell-lint/test-lint-shell.sh; scripts/lint-shell.sh tests/codex/test-marketplace-manifest.sh.
Bump all plugin manifests to 6.0.3. This release moves subagent-driven-
development's scratch artifacts (task briefs, implementer reports, review
diffs, progress ledger) from .git/sdd/ — which Claude Code denies agent
writes to — into a self-ignoring working-tree .superpowers/sdd/ dir, and
bumps the brainstorm-server test harness's ws dependency to clear two
dependabot alerts. See RELEASE-NOTES.md.
Clears two dependabot alerts on the test harness's ws dependency:
GHSA-96hv-2xvq-fx4p (high, memory-exhaustion DoS, fixed 8.21.0) and
GHSA-58qx-3vcg-4xpx (medium, uninitialized memory disclosure, fixed
8.20.1). Test-only — the shipped brainstorm server hand-rolls its
WebSocket framing and does not depend on ws. Suite passes (57/57).
The per-worktree workspace test was added but never registered in
run-skill-tests.sh, so it only ran when invoked by hand. Add it to the
fast unit-test array alongside the other pure-shell test.
Also document, in the Durable Progress section, that the ledger now
lives in git-ignored working-tree scratch, so `git clean -fdx` deletes
it — recover from `git log` if that happens.
- Brainstorm companion reads version from .codex-plugin/plugin.json when package.json is absent (PRI-2240)
- sync-to-codex script excludes .gitmodules and .pre-commit-config.yaml (PRI-1168)
Points evals at superpowers-evals 70a245c, which replaces the seven
per-agent *-superpowers-bootstrap scenarios with one cross-agent
superpowers-bootstrap scenario (adds the QUORUM_CODING_AGENT env var and
the bootstrap-installed dispatcher check verb).
