A portable harness metalayer for AI-native development. Twenty irreducible primitives plus a curated agent-skill roster that turn any agent-driven workspace into a self-operating system.
bstack is a CLI + governance substrate (not a skill), so it installs by clone + bootstrap — npx skills add broomva/bstack would drop its bin/, scripts/, schemas/, and templates (the repo-root-SKILL.md case of vercel-labs/skills#1523):
git clone https://github.com/broomva/bstack.git
cd bstack
./bin/bstack bootstrap # scaffolds governance + wires hooks + installs the skill rosterbstack bootstrap installs the companion-skill roster from the broomva/skills monorepo — npx skills add broomva/skills --skill <name> per entry (see references/companion-skills.yaml). Works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and the 50+ agent CLIs the skills ecosystem supports.
Want just the primitives primer for an agent (no CLI)?
npx skills add broomva/skills --skill bstack.
Each primitive closes one specific failure mode that drifts into entropy in unsupervised agent sessions.
| # | Primitive | Closes |
|---|---|---|
| P1 | Conversation Bridge | session amnesia |
| P2 | Control Gate | destructive ops the model didn't authorize |
| P3 | Linear Tickets | invisible work |
| P4 | PR Pipeline | merging unreviewed code |
| P5 | Parallel Agents | sequential bottleneck on independent tasks |
| P6 | Knowledge Bookkeeping | knowledge graph rot |
| P7 | Skill Freshness Check | silent rot of npx skills add snapshots |
| P8 | Branch + Worktree Janitor | squash-merged branches and dead worktrees accumulating |
| P9 | Productive Wait (broomva/p9 skill) |
sleep-on-wait dead time (CI, deploys, builds — PR CI is the canonical case) |
| P10 | Worktree Hygiene Discipline | dirty trees and orphan worktrees compounding across sessions |
| P11 | Empirical Feedback Loop | shipping code that compiles but doesn't actually work when exercised |
| P12 | Persistent Loop Discipline (broomva/persist skill) |
long-horizon work decaying as the context window rots |
| P13 | Dream Cycle Discipline | tier-crossing consolidation corrupting upper-tier rules without replay (the shadow dream failure mode) |
| P14 | Dependency-Chain Reasoning Discipline | "think deeply through chain of dependencies" becoming ritual without concrete upstream/downstream enumeration |
| P15 | State-Snapshot Before Action | plans built on stale state (uncommitted work, in-flight PRs, stale deploys) |
| P16 | Crystallization Discipline (the Bstack Engine) | recurring valuable patterns living only in the user's head, never promoted to infrastructure |
| P17 | Lens-Routed Request Articulation (broomva/role-x skill) |
flat-dispatch fan-out failing to load the domain context that shapes the correct quality bar |
| P18 | Format-Follows-Audience Discipline | markdown-by-default regardless of audience; specs nobody reads; ASCII pseudo-diagrams where SVG-in-HTML belongs |
| P19 | Orchestration-Mechanism Selection Discipline | implicit between-reflex handoffs ("continue please"); wrong mechanism for the work shape |
| P20 | Cross-Model Adversarial Review Gate (broomva/cross-review skill) |
same-model echo chamber; writer self-validates own work; AI slop merged with no independent evaluator |
Full reference with reflexive trigger rules, invariants, and cohesion narrative: references/primitives.md.
The majority of primitives (P6, P9–P20) are reasoning-enforced — they bind every agent through reflexive trigger rules in AGENTS.md rather than through hooks. The mechanism-enforced primitives (P1, P2, P4, P5, P7, P8) run through hooks, scripts, or CI gates.
bstack bootstrap installs the companion skills from the broomva/skills monorepo — npx skills add broomva/skills --skill <name> per entry. The authoritative, machine-readable list is references/companion-skills.yaml.
| Layer | Representative skills | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Foundation | agentic-control-kernel, harness-engineering-playbook, p9, cross-review |
Safety shields, governance, deterministic workflow, CI watcher, adversarial review |
| Memory & Knowledge | kg, bookkeeping, prompt-library |
Knowledge-graph loader, bookkeeping pipeline, persistent context |
| Orchestration | autonomous, persist, role-x, dogfood |
Full-discipline mode, cross-context loops, lens routing, empirical validation |
| Research & Intelligence | deep-dive-research-orchestrator, social-intelligence, skills-catalog |
Multi-dimensional research, engagement loop, skills inventory |
| Design | arcan-glass, design-engineering, brand-icons |
Design system, design-engineering, brand assets |
| Strategy & Finance | pre-mortem, decision-log, finance-substrate, investment-management |
Decision intelligence, Colombian tax substrate, portfolio tooling |
Every skill installs from the monorepo:
npx skills add broomva/skills --skill <name>. The standalonebroomva/<name>repos were consolidated into the monorepo (BRO-1561) — those install commands no longer resolve.
Once installed, the skill exposes these commands:
Lifecycle
bootstrap— install all 30 skills + scaffold governance (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md,.control/policy.yaml) + wire hooks + run doctordoctor— verify primitive contract compliance (always exits 0 by default;--strictfor CI)repair— apply targeted fixes for gaps the doctor surfacesstatus— show installed-vs-missing skills + harness healthvalidate— check skill SKILL.md frontmatter healthrevamp— full reconfiguration: force-reinstall + rewire + re-doctor
Orchestration & observability
wave— Orchestrate (P19) parallel sub-phase dispatch: one background agent + worktree per plan filecrystallize— Crystallize (P16) rule-of-three candidate detector over conversation logsmetrics— setpoint measurement pipeline (collect / observe)skills— companion-skill roster manager (install / status / list)bench— Empirical (P11) skill-evolution benchmark: two-phase cold→warm runs with pluggable LLM providers (OpenAI-compatible; Databricks Gateway built in). See references/provider-standards.md.
bstack's governance layer (CLAUDE.md + AGENTS.md + .control/policy.yaml) is the Level 3 controller in a Recursive Controlled Systems hierarchy with formal stability proofs. The L3 stability margin is narrow on purpose — governance changes consume budget, so the contract evolves slowly and deliberately.
| Level | System | Controller | Stability λ |
|---|---|---|---|
| L0 | External plant | Arcan agent loop | 1.455 |
| L1 | Agent internal | Autonomic homeostasis controller | 0.411 |
| L2 | Meta-control | EGRI loop engine | 0.069 |
| L3 | Governance | CLAUDE.md + AGENTS.md + policy.yaml | 0.006 |
Composite stability: λᵢ > 0 at all levels ⟹ exponentially stable.
Interactive catalog with descriptions, install commands, and layer diagrams:
The narrative on what bstack is, why it exists, and what the twenty primitives buy you in measured throughput is at: