written by Forgecat

gstack

AI engineering workflow stack for planning, review, QA, security, browser automation, design, deployment, iOS workflows, documentation, and OpenClaw companion skills.

Tags

• engineering-workflow
• browser-qa
• code-review
• security
• design
• deployment
• ios
• openclaw
• claude-code

Installation

Skills / Agents / Commands

• gstack — Fast headless browser for QA testing and site dogfooding. (gstack) skill
• autoplan — Auto-review pipeline — reads the full CEO, design, eng, and DX review skills from disk and runs them sequentially with auto-decisions using 6 decision principles. (gstack) skill
• benchmark-models — Cross-model benchmark for gstack skills. (gstack) skill
• benchmark — Performance regression detection using the browse daemon. (gstack) skill
• browse — Fast headless browser for QA testing and site dogfooding. (gstack) skill
• hackernews-frontpage — Scrape the Hacker News front page (titles, points, comment counts). skill
• canary — Post-deploy canary monitoring. (gstack) skill
• careful — Safety guardrails for destructive commands. (gstack) skill
• codex — OpenAI Codex CLI wrapper — three modes. (gstack) skill
• connect-chrome — Launch GStack Browser — AI-controlled Chromium with the sidebar extension baked in. skill
• context-restore — Restore working context saved earlier by /context-save. (gstack) skill
• context-save — Save working context. (gstack) skill
• cso — Chief Security Officer mode. (gstack) skill
• design-consultation — Design consultation: understands your product, researches the landscape, proposes a complete design system (aesthetic, typography, color, layout, spacing, motion), and generates font+color preview... (gstack) skill
• design-html — Design finalization: generates production-quality Pretext-native HTML/CSS. (gstack) skill
• design-review — Designer's eye QA: finds visual inconsistency, spacing issues, hierarchy problems, AI slop patterns, and slow interactions — then fixes them. (gstack) skill
• design-shotgun — Design shotgun: generate multiple AI design variants, open a comparison board, collect structured feedback, and iterate. (gstack) skill
• devex-review — Live developer experience audit. (gstack) skill
• document-generate — Generate missing documentation from scratch for a feature, module, or entire project. (gstack) skill
• document-release — Post-ship documentation update. (gstack) skill
• freeze — Restrict file edits to a specific directory for the session. (gstack) skill
• gstack-upgrade — Upgrade gstack to the latest version. skill
• guard — Full safety mode: destructive command warnings + directory-scoped edits. (gstack) skill
• health — Code quality dashboard. (gstack) skill
• investigate — Systematic debugging with root cause investigation. (gstack) skill
• ios-clean — Remove the DebugBridge SPM package and all #if DEBUG wiring from an iOS app. (gstack) skill
• ios-design-review — Visual design audit for iOS apps on real hardware. (gstack) skill
• ios-fix — Autonomous iOS bug fixer. (gstack) skill
• ios-qa — Live-device iOS QA for SwiftUI apps. (gstack) skill
• ios-sync — Regenerate the iOS debug bridge against the latest upstream gstack templates. (gstack) skill
• land-and-deploy — Land and deploy workflow. (gstack) skill
• landing-report — Read-only queue dashboard for workspace-aware ship. (gstack) skill
• learn — Manage project learnings. skill
• make-pdf — Turn any markdown file into a publication-quality PDF. (gstack) skill
• office-hours — YC Office Hours — two modes. (gstack) skill
• open-gstack-browser — Launch GStack Browser — AI-controlled Chromium with the sidebar extension baked in. skill
• gstack-openclaw-ceo-review — Use when asked to review a plan, challenge a proposal, run a CEO review, poke holes in an approach, think bigger about scope, or decide whether to expand or reduce the plan. skill
• gstack-openclaw-investigate — Use when asked to debug, fix a bug, investigate an error, or do root cause analysis, and when users report errors, stack traces, unexpected behavior, or say something stopped working. skill
• gstack-openclaw-office-hours — Use when asked to brainstorm, evaluate whether an idea is worth building, run office hours, or think through a new product idea or design direction before any code is written. skill
• gstack-openclaw-retro — Weekly engineering retrospective. Analyzes commit history, work patterns, and code quality metrics with persistent history and trend tracking. Team-aware with per-person contributions, praise, and growth areas. Use when asked for weekly retro, what shipped this week, or engineering retrospective. skill
• pair-agent — Pair a remote AI agent with your browser. (gstack) skill
• plan-ceo-review — CEO/founder-mode plan review. (gstack) skill
• plan-design-review — Designer's eye plan review — interactive, like CEO and Eng review. (gstack) skill
• plan-devex-review — Interactive developer experience plan review. (gstack) skill
• plan-eng-review — Eng manager-mode plan review. (gstack) skill
• plan-tune — Self-tuning question sensitivity + developer psychographic for gstack (v1: observational). (gstack) skill
• qa-only — Report-only QA testing. (gstack) skill
• qa — Systematically QA test a web application and fix bugs found. (gstack) skill
• retro — Weekly engineering retrospective. (gstack) skill
• review — Pre-landing PR review. (gstack) skill
• scrape — Pull data from a web page. (gstack) skill
• setup-browser-cookies — Import cookies from your real Chromium browser into the headless browse session. (gstack) skill
• setup-deploy — Configure deployment settings for /land-and-deploy. skill
• setup-gbrain — Set up gbrain for this coding agent: install the CLI, initialize a local PGLite or Supabase brain, register MCP, capture per-remote trust policy. (gstack) skill
• ship — Ship workflow: detect + merge base branch, run tests, review diff, bump VERSION, update CHANGELOG, commit, push, create PR. (gstack) skill
• skillify — Codify the most recent successful /scrape flow into a permanent browser-skill on disk. (gstack) skill
• sync-gbrain — Keep gbrain current with this repo's code and refresh agent search guidance in CLAUDE.md. Wraps the gstack-gbrain-sync orchestrator with state (gstack) skill
• unfreeze — Clear the freeze boundary set by /freeze, allowing edits to all directories again. (gstack) skill

Details

Compatibility

Platforms

Dependencies

• Git
• Bun v1.0+
• Node.js for Windows and Node-backed workflows

---

written by original source

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

1. Install gstack (30 seconds — see below)
2. Run /office-hours — describe what you're building
3. Run /plan-ceo-review on any feature idea
4. Run /review on any branch with changes
5. Run /qa on your staging URL
6. Stop there. You'll know if this is for you.

Install — 30 seconds

Requirements: Claude Code, Git, Bun v1.0+, Node.js (Windows only)

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 $GSTACK_ROOT && cd $GSTACK_ROOT && ./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, /ship, /land-and-deploy, /canary, /benchmark, /browse, /connect-chrome, /qa, /qa-only, /design-review, /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:

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 $GSTACK_ROOT && cd $GSTACK_ROOT && ./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:

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:

These are conversational skills. Your OpenClaw agent runs them directly via chat.

Other AI Agents

gstack works on 10 AI coding agents, not just Claude. Setup auto-detects which agents you have installed:

Or target a specific agent with ./setup --host <name>:

Want to add support for another agent? See docs/ADDING_A_HOST.md. It's one TypeScript config file, zero code changes.

See it work

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.

Which review should I use?

Power tools

New binaries (v0.19)

Beyond the slash-command skills, gstack ships standalone CLIs for workflows that don't belong inside a session:

Continuous checkpoint mode (opt-in, local by default)

Set gstack-config set checkpoint_mode continuous and skills auto-commit your work as you go with a WIP: prefix plus a structured [gstack-context] body (decisions, remaining work, failed approaches). Survives crashes and context switches. /context-restore reads those commits to reconstruct session state. /ship filter-squashes WIP commits before the PR (preserving non-WIP commits) so bisect stays clean. Push is opt-in via checkpoint_push=true — default is local-only so you don't trigger CI on every WIP commit.

Domain skills + raw CDP escape hatch

Two new browser primitives compound the gstack 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.

/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. Every /qa bug fix generates a regression test. 100% test coverage is the goal — tests make vibe coding safe instead of yolo coding.

/document-release is the engineer you never had. It reads every doc file in your project, cross-references the diff, and updates everything that drifted. README, ARCHITECTURE, CONTRIBUTING, CLAUDE.md, TODOS — all kept current automatically. And now /ship auto-invokes it — docs stay current without an extra command.

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: a 22MB ML classifier bundled with the browser scans every page and tool output locally, a Claude Haiku transcript check votes on the full conversation shape, a random canary token in the system prompt catches session exfil attempts across text, tool args, URLs, and file writes, and a verdict combiner requires two classifiers to agree before blocking (prevents single-model false positives on Stack Overflow-style instruction pages). A shield icon in the sidebar header shows status (green/amber/red). Opt in to a 721MB DeBERTa-v3 ensemble via GSTACK_SECURITY_ENSEMBLE=deberta for 2-of-3 agreement. 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. /codex gets an independent review from OpenAI's Codex CLI — a completely different AI looking at the same diff. Three modes: code review with a pass/fail gate, adversarial challenge that actively tries to break your code, and open consultation with session continuity. When both /review (Claude) and /codex (OpenAI) have reviewed the same branch, you get a cross-model analysis showing which findings overlap and which are unique to each.

Safety guardrails on demand. Say "be careful" and /careful warns before any destructive command — recursive remove, 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:

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):

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.

---

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."

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.

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

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.

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

Skill not showing up? cd $GSTACK_ROOT && ./setup

/browse fails? cd $GSTACK_ROOT && bun install && bun run build

Stale install? Run /gstack-upgrade — or set auto_upgrade: true in ~/.gstack/config.yaml

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

Want namespaced commands? cd $GSTACK_ROOT && ./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. Fix: cd $GSTACK_ROOT && git pull && ./setup --host codex — or for repo-local installs: cd "$(readlink -f $GSTACK_ROOT)" && git pull && ./setup --host codex

Windows users: gstack works on Windows 11 via Git Bash or WSL. 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.

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 $GSTACK_ROOT && ./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.

Claude says it can't see the skills? Make sure your project's CLAUDE.md has a gstack section. Add this:

License

MIT. Free forever. Go build something.