Gentleman-Programming/gentle-ai v3.0.0

v3.0.0 — Organic Driven Development as the Default Workflow

on GitHub

Gentle AI v3.0.0 is a major release. It makes Organic Driven Development (ODD) the orchestrator's mandatory default protocol on every supported runtime (Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex, and Pi), so a plain feature request now runs through explore, resolve, classify, track, implement, and close without the user asking for a workflow or task tracking. Substantial authorized work gets a durable feature document (odd/tasks/<feature>.md) with a full Engram mirror that survives interruptions and resumes, and implementation honors a resolved, configured TDD mode instead of guessing. SDD stays available as an explicitly selected alternative and is meaningfully lighter: research and verification are optional activities rather than admission certificates, and archive proceeds from truthful task state without requiring an attestation. Receipt-driven development (RDD) is removed from the SDD lifecycle itself but remains fully available as the separate, user-owned review switch (gentle-ai review mode enable|disable|status) at ordinary deliverable boundaries. Three fixes round out the release: agent artifacts installed globally no longer leak into the current project's working directory, contributor-only workflow skills no longer ship in the default preset, and a Windows-only CLI test flake is resolved.

Provenance

• Previous stable: v2.9.1 → 9ec0cf44
• Release target: v3.0.0 → 1a2f67751f135fc499a82ac738e4ecb81e68d37d
• Release workflow: run 35102943162
• Verification: preflight, release, and verify jobs all succeeded.
• Provider contract: 1.2.0

What's new

Organic Driven Development is now the default protocol

Every orchestrator now opens its implementation routing by declaring ODD as its predefined workflow, followed by an ordered, mandatory protocol that runs on every request: Authorize, Explore, Resolve uncertainty, Classify, Track before the first write, Implement task by task, and Close. All twelve SDD orchestrator assets state the same default before any SDD instruction is read, so SDD is a branch inside ODD entered only by an explicit request or an accepted proposal. Field evidence recorded on the candidate: Claude Code and Codex run the protocol on a plain feature request that never mentions workflow or tasks, creating odd/tasks/<feature>.md and its Engram mirror unasked, while a documentation-only control creates nothing (#4644).

Unified feature continuity and configured TDD

Authorized ODD work now keeps one feature document at odd/tasks/<feature-name>.md covering objective, problem, scope, an actionable checklist, acceptance criteria, evidence, progress, and next step, mirrored in full to project-scoped Engram topic odd/<feature-name>/tasks. Accepted changes update intent and tasks together: valid completed work is preserved, new tasks are added, and invalidated items are reopened with a reason. TDD mode, its source, and the exact test runner are resolved from existing configuration or explicit user choice, then forwarded on every implementation delegation and refreshed on resume; when enabled, implementation requires observed RED, then GREEN, then REFACTOR (#4608).

Simplified SDD

The SDD lifecycle was reworked to remove ceremony that had become gatekeeping rather than value: research is now an optional investigation instead of an admission step, verification is optional and diagnostic rather than a precondition for archive, and archive proceeds directly from the completed application with the true task and artifact state, unfinished work included. Retired review projections and attempt/report-validation machinery were removed from internal/sddstatus and internal/cli, while live grant integrity, artifact locators, task-progress routing, and safe archive composition remain enforced (#4642).

RDD stays available outside the SDD lifecycle

Receipt-driven development is no longer wired into the SDD phase sequence, but it remains a stable, user-owned review switch: gentle-ai review mode enable|disable|status continues to control native review at ordinary deliverable boundaries, independent of which workflow (ODD or SDD) produced the change.

Breaking changes

This release declares SDD-lifecycle breaking changes, landed through PR #4642's integrated child chain:

• RDD removed from the SDD lifecycle (e0774e05): SDD no longer offers or launches review as part of its own phase sequence. Review remains available only through the separate, user-owned RDD switch described above.
• Attempt governance retired (18fa04fb): runtime-attempt tracking and budget/exhaustion machinery are gone. Real edit-grant authorization and authenticated historical grant reads are preserved; sdd-attempt grant still records explicitly authorized edit roots for a change.
• Verification made optional; archive without attestation (62ce74b7): sdd-verify no longer gates sdd-archive. Archive proceeds with truthful, possibly unfinished, task state instead of requiring a verification report. The retired sdd-verify-validate operation is no longer available.
• Research admission replaced (ba3ed690): the mandatory research-admission step was replaced with optional, source-backed investigation using available authorized tools, with no administrative admission gate.
• Retired-only tests and CI selectors tied to the removed governance were removed alongside the production code; 108 retired SDD paths are confirmed absent from the integrated tree.
• Go module path stays at /v2. This major version is cut from the existing github.com/gentleman-programming/gentle-ai/v2 module without a path migration. Go requires the module path suffix to match the tag major, so go install github.com/gentleman-programming/gentle-ai/v2/cmd/gentle-ai@v3.0.0 is rejected by the toolchain. Homebrew and the signed archives are unaffected. Windows has no binary archives and installs through go install, so Windows users cannot install or upgrade to v3.0.0; they stay on v2.9.1 until a follow-up release moves the module to /v3. The gentle-pi installer's Windows source path is affected the same way.

The provider contract stays byte-frozen at 1.2.0: contracts/review-provider-contract/CONTRACT_SEMVER is unchanged between v2.9.1 and this release.

Run gentle-ai sync after upgrading so installed agent, skill, and orchestrator assets reflect the simplified SDD contracts and the new ODD-default routing; skipping sync leaves previously installed prompts on the old phase sequence.

Upgrade now

brew upgrade gentle-ai
gentle-ai sync

Run gentle-ai sync after upgrading so managed agent, reviewer, and runtime assets match the installed binary.

What was fixed

Agent artifact scoping independent of runtime cwd

Global install and sync were writing agent artifacts into the current repository instead of the intended scope, because OpenClaw's runtime workspace configuration overrode installer scope. The fix uses the existing canonical scope resolver: a global install targets the home directory, and an explicit workspace installation targets that workspace. Runtime cwd is preserved for project-scoped tools (CodeGraph, RTK, Pi CodeGraph, and OpenCode telemetry); global Pi persona injection, backup, and verification now consistently use the home directory.

Included work: #4673 (issue #4668).

Contributor skills kept out of the default preset

The default install was shipping this repository's own contributor-workflow skills (branch-pr, issue-creation, systemic-issue-triage, rdd-defect-workflow, gentle-ai-bench, comment-writer) to every user. Preset membership and selectable inventory were conflated in a single list; the fix splits them so foundationSkills holds only the product skills while AllSkillIDs() still returns every selectable skill for the TUI picker and explicit --skills selection. chained-pr and skill-registry remain in the default set because distributed orchestrator prompts and the skill-resolution protocol depend on them.

Included work: #4671 (issue #4669).

Windows Full Suite test fix

TestRunSDDAttemptGrantPersistsAndReplaysThroughTheCLI asserted the granted sibling root with a raw substring match against sdd-status --json output. Because encoding/json escapes backslashes in Windows paths, the verbatim path never appeared in the encoded output, so the Windows Full Suite cli-r-other shard failed on every run since 70c774f8. The test now decodes the SDD status JSON into its typed projection and checks actionContext.allowedEditRoots instead of substring-matching the raw output. Production code is unchanged.

Included work: #4676 (issue #4675).

Numbers

15 non-merge commits, 7 merged pull requests, and 1 unique GitHub PR author since v2.9.1.

Install

brew install Gentleman-Programming/tap/gentle-ai

The go install path is not available for v3.0.0 because the module path still carries the /v2 major suffix (see Breaking changes). Windows installation and upgrade are therefore unavailable for this release; Windows users remain on v2.9.1 until the module path moves to /v3. Official Windows binary archives and Scoop publication remain unavailable.

Signed platform archives below: linux_amd64, linux_arm64, darwin_amd64, darwin_arm64, with checksums.txt and its minisign signature.

Full changelog: v2.9.1...v3.0.0