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GSD Core is a lightweight meta-prompting, context-engineering, and spec-driven development framework that sits on top of any AI coding runtime. Rather than replacing your editor or AI assistant, GSD Core gives it structure: a repeatable phase loop, a set of specialist subagents, and a .planning/ directory of human-readable artifacts that survive every session boundary, every /clear, and every context reset.

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The problem GSD Core solves

Most AI-coding setups work well for small tasks but degrade silently as projects grow. Three forces cause the breakdown: Context rot. As a conversation grows, the AI fills its context window with accumulated back-and-forth. Recall weakens, reasoning degrades, and output quality quietly drops — without any warning to you or the model. No shared memory between sessions. Start a new session and the AI knows nothing about yesterday’s decisions, your architecture choices, or the bugs you already ruled out. You spend the first ten minutes re-explaining what already happened. No verification that code works. Most AI coding flows end at “execution complete.” Nothing checks that what was built actually satisfies the requirements, passes tests, or matches the design you approved. GSD Core solves all three. Heavy research, planning, and execution work runs in fresh-context subagents so context rot never accumulates. Structured artifacts like STATE.md, CONTEXT.md, and continue-here.md persist everything important across session boundaries. And the Verify step walks through what was built, diagnoses gaps, and generates fix plans before a phase is declared done.

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Supported runtimes

GSD Core installs its commands, agents, and hooks into whichever AI coding runtime you use. The same phase loop and artifact structure work across all of them.

Claude Code

OpenCode

Gemini CLI

Kilo

Codex

GitHub Copilot

Cursor

Windsurf

Antigravity

Cline

Augment Code

Trae

Qwen Code

Hermes Agent

CodeBuddy

The installer handles all runtime-specific adaptation at install time. You never need to copy or modify files from the agents/ or commands/ directories manually.

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How it works

GSD Core structures every milestone as a repeatable five-step loop, one phase at a time:
  1. Discuss — capture your implementation decisions before anything is planned
  2. Plan — run parallel research agents, decompose work into atomic tasks, verify the plan fits a fresh context window
  3. Execute — run plans in parallel execution waves; each executor starts with a clean context window of up to 200K tokens
  4. Verify — walk through what was built, run tests, diagnose gaps, and produce fix plans before declaring done
  5. Ship — create the PR, archive the phase artifacts, and move to the next phase
Each step produces artifacts that feed the next. Nothing is held in conversation memory — everything is written to disk in .planning/ as plain Markdown and JSON.

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Get started

Installation

Install GSD Core with one command and walk through the interactive setup for your runtime.

Quickstart

Initialize your first project, run the five-step phase loop, and ship your first PR.