| Initial | bash + claude as the runtime | No agent-runtime opinion. Drop-in replaceable. ~1500 lines of supervisor that anyone can read in an afternoon. |
| Initial | Disk-only state | Any role can be invoked from a fresh shell at any time and produce the same output. Snapshots take iteration boundaries with no quiescence. |
| Initial | Fresh context per role | No drift across iterations. Anthropic prompt cache absorbs the cost (99.94% hit rate observed). See Why fresh contexts. |
| Initial | Per-role markdown prompts | Improvements compound without code changes. Branch-mergeable. Cache-key-stable. |
| Initial | Curator role | Without compaction raw.md grows unboundedly. Curator owns memory pruning. See Why a curator. |
| Mid | Plan-reviewer gate | Borrowed the structural intuition from gstack’s /plan-ceo-review but made it autonomous and gating. Catches scope drift before any worker fires. |
| Mid | Debugger role | Stuck features at attempts ≥ 3 deserve root-cause analysis, not blind retry. Fires once, writes notes, next worker reads them. |
| Mid | Crosscheck role | Different model re-validates the validator’s pass. Catches “confidently wrong” validator decisions. Optional, gated by config. |
| Late | Cost-cap removed | Was exiting at $25 vs real $135 spend (miscount). User wanted unbounded cost. Replaced with cost-soft-warn that paused via SIGSTOP. Even that was disabled. |
| Late | TDD iron law in validator | Superpowers-inspired. Behavioural assertions need a test that failed before the change. ~20-line prompt change, biggest quality lever we have. |
| Late | Boil the lake principle | gstack-inspired. Roles that sprawled (debugger, ui-qa, curator, product, architect) got an explicit “do fewer things perfectly” section. |
| Late | Evidence rule | claudecode-orchestrator-inspired. Every PASS claim must quote source output. Reports without evidence revert to failing. |
| Late | IDENTITY.md per role | Agent-Swarm-inspired. Cross-mission append-only memory. Curator promotes recurring patterns. |
| Late | TRICK: convention | MOLTRON-inspired. Worker-tagged generalisable observations get promoted to identity/worker.md after recurring. |
| Late | Named checkpoints | Hermes-inspired. Pre-agreed milestones gate progress. Distinct from escalations. Auto-fire on triggerOn: post-planner. |
| Late | Git worktrees | Composio-inspired. Each parallel lane gets its own filesystem dir. No git race possible. |
| Late | Service smoke-test | claudecode-orchestrator-inspired. Real curl + service startup before declaring DONE. Reopens features on failure. |
| Late | Two-mode parallelism | Conductor-inspired. lane (different features) vs competition (same feature, validator picks winner). |
| Late | Decisions timeline + ghost rate | Genuine differentiator. No other framework exposes orchestrator parse-ghost telemetry. |
