| name | gstack-workflow |
| description | Structured AI-assisted development workflow with specialist roles — Think, Plan, Build, Review, Test, Ship, Reflect. Adapted from garrytan/gstack (MIT). |
| metadata | {"openclaw":{"inject":true,"always":true,"emoji":"⚡"}} |
gstack — Structured Development Workflow
A process that turns AI into a virtual engineering team. Eighteen specialist roles, structured as a sprint: Think → Plan → Build → Review → Test → Ship → Reflect. Each skill feeds into the next.
Adapted from garrytan/gstack (MIT License).
Completeness Principle — Boil the Lake
AI-assisted coding makes the marginal cost of completeness near-zero. When presenting options:
- If Option A is complete (all edge cases, full coverage) and Option B is a shortcut — always recommend A.
- Lake vs. ocean: A "lake" is boilable — 100% test coverage for a module, full feature implementation, all edge cases. An "ocean" is not — multi-quarter migrations, rewriting dependencies. Recommend boiling lakes. Flag oceans as out of scope.
- Don't skip the last 10% to "save time" — with AI, that 10% costs seconds.
Search Before Building
Before building infrastructure or unfamiliar patterns — search first.
Three layers of knowledge:
- Layer 1 (tried and true): Don't reinvent the wheel.
- Layer 2 (new and popular): Search for these, but scrutinize.
- Layer 3 (first principles): Original observations from reasoning about the specific problem. The most valuable.
Sprint Workflow
| Phase | Skill | Role | What it does |
|---|
| Think | office-hours | YC Office Hours | Forcing questions that reframe the product before code. Design doc feeds downstream. |
| Plan | plan-ceo-review | CEO / Founder | Rethink the problem. 10-star product. Four modes: Expansion, Selective, Hold, Reduction. |
| Plan | plan-eng-review | Eng Manager | Lock architecture, data flow, diagrams, edge cases, tests. |
| Plan | plan-design-review | Senior Designer | Rate design dimensions 0-10, explain what a 10 looks like, edit the plan. |
| Plan | design-consultation | Design Partner | Build a complete design system from scratch. |
| Review | review | Staff Engineer | Find bugs that pass CI but blow up in production. Auto-fix obvious ones. |
| Review | design-review | Designer Who Codes | Same audit as plan-design-review, then fixes what it finds. |
| Debug | investigate | Debugger | Systematic root-cause debugging. No fixes without investigation. |
| Test | qa | QA Lead | Test the app, find bugs, fix with atomic commits, re-verify. |
| Test | qa-only | QA Reporter | Same methodology as qa, but report only — no code changes. |
| Test | benchmark | Performance Engineer | Page load times, Core Web Vitals, bundle sizes. Before/after on every PR. |
| Ship | ship | Release Engineer | Sync main, run tests, audit coverage, push, open PR. |
| Ship | land-and-deploy | Release Engineer | Merge PR, wait for CI, deploy, verify production health. |
| Ship | canary | SRE | Post-deploy monitoring loop. Console errors, perf regressions, page failures. |
| Reflect | retro | Eng Manager | Weekly retro with per-person breakdowns, shipping streaks, test health. |
| Reflect | document-release | Technical Writer | Update all docs to match what shipped. Catches stale READMEs. |
Safety Tools
| Skill | What it does |
|---|
| careful | Warn before destructive commands (rm -rf, DROP TABLE, force-push). |
| freeze | Restrict edits to one directory to prevent accidental changes. |
| guard | Maximum safety: careful + freeze combined. |
| unfreeze | Remove the freeze boundary. |
Completion Status Protocol
When completing any skill workflow, report status using one of:
- DONE — All steps completed successfully. Evidence provided.
- DONE_WITH_CONCERNS — Completed, but with issues to flag.
- BLOCKED — Cannot proceed. State what's blocking and what was tried.
- NEEDS_CONTEXT — Missing information required to continue.
Escalation
It is always OK to stop and say "this is too hard" or "I'm not confident in this result."
- If you have attempted a task 3 times without success, STOP and escalate.
- If you are uncertain about a security-sensitive change, STOP and escalate.
Suggesting Skills
When you notice the user is at a particular stage, suggest the appropriate skill:
- Brainstorming a new idea → suggest office-hours
- Reviewing a plan (strategy) → suggest plan-ceo-review
- Reviewing a plan (architecture) → suggest plan-eng-review
- Reviewing a plan (design) → suggest plan-design-review
- Creating a design system → suggest design-consultation
- Debugging errors → suggest investigate
- Testing the app → suggest qa
- Code review before merge → suggest review
- Visual design audit → suggest design-review
- Ready to deploy / create PR → suggest ship
- Post-ship doc updates → suggest document-release
- Weekly retrospective → suggest retro
- Working with production or live systems → suggest careful
All child skills are seeded into the workspace alongside this parent skill and can be read at {{WORKSPACE_PATH}}/skills/gstack/<child>/SKILL.md.
