The evals harness was renamed Drill -> Quorum and rewritten from
Python/uv to Bun/TypeScript; docs/testing.md and CLAUDE.md still
described the old tool. Beyond the rename, the old text also
misdescribed the system: quorum is the harness CLI, one part of the
eval lab — it drives real coding-agent CLIs through a Gauntlet QA
agent and grades against scenario acceptance criteria plus
deterministic post-checks. The quick start now matches the eval
repo's actual commands (bun install / bun run quorum run
scenarios/<name> --coding-agent claude; scenarios are directories,
not *.yaml) and points at the Live Eval Risk section before anyone
runs a permissive-mode session.
Drift reported in closed PR #2121 (@JFWaskin); that PR's replacement
quick start kept the uv commands, so this rewrite goes from the eval
repo's README instead.
Record Drew's approved reduced design after the second staff review. Limit preflight to the mutating bump path, cover audit's independent read path, and require byte-for-byte proof that deterministic YAML failures cannot partially update earlier JSON manifests.
Provide one TDD implementation task for the Hermes registry entry, jq/yq dispatch, focused preflight, and three behavioral checks. Explicitly defer rollback, audit-status changes, nested YAML, runtime changes, and broader release-tool refactoring.
Incorporate the adversarial design review without turning the Hermes wiring follow-up into a general release-script refactor. Keep the existing jq path, add Mike Farah yq v4 only for .yaml, and retain one read-only preflight to prevent deterministic partial bumps.\n\nReduce the test contract to three behavioral cases and explicitly defer .yml support, nested YAML, rollback machinery, audit/status redesign, exhaustive failure matrices, and the separately discovered JSON-expression issue. This follows Drew's direction to avoid ceremony and overengineering.
Document the agreed follow-up to PR #2025 on a branch based on its merged dev commit. The design registers the Hermes YAML manifest, keeps jq for existing JSON files, and uses Mike Farah yq v4 for a narrow top-level YAML field rather than adding a Bash parser.\n\nDefine focused failure behavior and behavioral tests while explicitly excluding nested YAML, Hermes runtime changes, and unrelated release-script refactors. This captures Drew's request to keep the implementation small and avoid process or abstraction overhead.
Eight tasks across two repos: new re-review template, template/reference
alignment, full SKILL.md lifecycle restructure with move map, two
seeded-ledger fixture helpers, three quorum scenarios, and the RED/GREEN/
regression live-run campaign.
Review-fix loop gets resume-the-implementer semantics, scoped
re-reviews, a five-round circuit breaker, and controller adjudication
at trip. SKILL.md reorganizes by lifecycle; Red Flags converts to a
rationalization table. Brainstormed with Jesse 2026-07-15.
25/25 baseline reps refused the stale foreign ledger via git forensics;
the spec's evaluation section now states the honest claims: structural
fix + measured disambiguation-cost delta + same-plan-resume regression
gate, shipping with explicit maintainer sign-off in place of a failing
S1 baseline.
Three RED rounds (25 reps, three framings incl. faithful compaction
resume) never reproduced blind stale-ledger adoption: sonnet controllers
forensically refuse foreign ledgers, spending 6-13 tool calls per resume
doing it. Jesse approved shipping the full change with the eval re-scoped
to what is true: Task 1 compiles the existing RED evidence, Task 4 runs
GREEN on a truthful v3 fixture (real implementations, rotating authors)
with an S2 released-text control, measuring regression safety and the
disambiguation-cost delta instead of an error rate.
Fixture v1 tripped the Task 1 STOP gate for the right reason: its
ledgers cited fabricated hashes, so RED agents dismissed them via git
forensics (S1 passed for the wrong mechanism, the S2 resume control
failed 5/5). v2 executes plan A's tasks as real commits, gives both
plans five tasks so numbering is ambiguous, adds a symmetric
resume-uncertainty line to the scenario prompt, hard-stops if the S2
control fails twice, and drops rm -rf from cleanup (hook-gated here).
Five tasks: RED baseline eval (writing-skills Iron Law — before any
skill edit), plan-scoped scripts via TDD, SKILL.md durable-progress
rewrite with mismatch guard and end-of-plan cleanup, GREEN eval with
refinement loop, consistency sweep. Eval = 5 fresh sonnet subagents per
scenario per arm, hand-scored.
The .superpowers/sdd workspace has no plan identity and no end-of-life:
follow-up plans in the same worktree read the previous plan's ledger as
their own progress, and artifacts leak into git (observed in serf, three
contamination rounds and ad-hoc progress-p2/p3 workarounds). Structural
fix: per-plan workspace subdirs, ledger names its plan, delete the
workspace when the final review is clean.
e7ddc25 deleted claude-code-tools.md and copilot-tools.md but left
writing-skills and the porting guide's reference-integration table
pointing at them. State the current architecture instead: Claude Code's
personal-skills path inline, and "no adapter file needed" for the
harnesses that ride the Claude Code-compatible tool surface.
Reported by @rasibintang (#1969, with a fix proposed in #1970).
Fixes#1969
hooks/session-start-codex has had no caller since "Remove Codex hooks"
(#1845) deleted hooks-codex.json and its manifest registration; the
Codex manifest now declares an empty hooks object so Codex registers no
session-start hook at all. The script is Codex-specific dead code —
nothing executes it on Codex or any other harness.
- Delete hooks/session-start-codex.
- tests/hooks/test-session-start.sh: drop the two Codex cases that are
redundant with the generic session-start tests (nested-format and the
legacy-warning omission are already covered by the Claude Code cases).
Re-point the "wrapper dispatches" case to the live `session-start`
script so run-hook.cmd dispatch coverage — used by Claude Code and
Cursor in production — is preserved rather than lost.
- docs/porting-to-a-new-harness.md: Codex is no longer a Shape A
(shell-hook) harness, so re-anchor that worked example to Cursor (a
live shell-hook harness that demonstrates the same per-harness field,
schema, and matcher variance) and mark Codex as native skill discovery
with no session-start hook. Clears the references to the deleted
hooks-codex.json.
- docs/windows/polyglot-hooks.md: the "check hooks-codex.json" pointer
referenced a file deleted in #1845; re-point to hooks-cursor.json.
RELEASE-NOTES.md keeps its historical mention of hooks-codex.json (it
accurately records what that release did). The tests/codex-plugin-sync
fixtures build their own synthetic session-start-codex and test the sync
mechanism generically, so they are intentionally left as-is.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Live eval deliverables shipped five polish defects; tracing each through
the transcripts showed three mechanisms, each now addressed:
- reviewers answered pointed checklist items with unsupported yes
(evidence rule: every What-to-Check answer needs file:line evidence)
- no reviewer ever saw the design's global constraints (controllers now
paste binding constraints into task requirements)
- test output noise was invisible everywhere (pristine-output checks in
implementer self-review and quality review)
A live eval run of sdd-quality-reviewer-catches-planted-defect caught the
SDD controller fabricating a plan constraint and instructing the quality
reviewer not to flag the planted DRY violation. The duplication shipped.
Constructing Reviewer Prompts now bans suppression directives alongside
open-ended broadening directives.
Records the triage of open issues/PRs touching the brainstorm companion server
and the decision to protect it with a per-session secret key (supersedes the
Host/Origin allowlist approach) so remote-connected users are covered, not just
loopback.
Rewrite the Windows polyglot hook documentation to match the current run-hook.cmd dispatcher and update the porting guide cross-reference.\n\nFixes #1653.
An evergreen guide for adding support for a new harness (IDE, CLI, or agent
runner). Teaches the invariants — automatic session-start bootstrap, skill
discovery/invocation, tool mapping, the acceptance test — and points at the
closest reference integration shape (shell-hook, in-process plugin,
instructions-file / declared context file) to copy. Covers discovery, build,
local install, tmux-driven verification, distribution, and PR submission, with a
live reference-integration index and a gotchas appendix.
Two non-negotiable rules: (1) never edit skill bodies; (2) everything ships
through the harness's own install mechanism — never edit the user's config. When
a plugin installer strips undeclared files, declare the bootstrap as a recognized
component (a manifest contextFileName-style context file the installer preserves
and the harness loads every session), generated at install time from the live
SKILL.md + tool mapping. Surfaced-skill-description bootstrap is the softer
fallback.
Hardened against real end-to-end ports (Antigravity CLI): shapes can compose; a
fork doesn't inherit its parent's behavior; a hook system != a usable
session-start event; verify @-includes AND context-file preservation with a
marker; web-search the docs and study existing plugins; reverse-engineer
undocumented harnesses; print/headless modes may hang; workspace-trust gates
stall tmux; declared context files survive plugin install while undeclared files
are stripped; skills-path registration is per-harness.
Jesse Vincent