broomva bstack — the Broomva Stack (primitives primer)
A portable harness metalayer for AI-native development. Twenty irreducible primitives that turn any agent-driven workspace into a self-operating system. Each primitive closes one failure mode that otherwise drifts into entropy in unsupervised agent sessions.
This file is the agent-readable primer, not the CLI. It teaches you the primitive contract so you can reason with it. The bstack CLI + governance substrate (the
bstackbinary,doctor, templates, hooks, schemas) is a separate product:git clone https://github.com/broomva/bstack.git cd bstack && ./bin/bstack bootstrapDo not
npx skills add broomva/bstack— bstack has a repo-rootSKILL.mdbesidebin/, so skills.sh copies only that file and drops the CLI (vercel-labs/skills#1523).bstack bootstrapinstalls the companion-skill roster from this monorepo:npx skills add broomva/skills --skill <name>per entry.
Referencing primitives
Use the Name (Pn) form in prose — "applying Snapshot (P15)", "via Dep-Chain
(P14)", "running Bookkeeping (P6)". The number is the canonical id; the name is
the human handle.
Short-name index: Bridge (P1) · Gate (P2) · Tickets (P3) · Pipeline (P4) · Fanout (P5) · Bookkeeping (P6) · Freshness (P7) · Janitor (P8) · Wait (P9) · Hygiene (P10) · Empirical (P11) · Persist (P12) · Dream (P13) · Dep-Chain (P14) · Snapshot (P15) · Crystallize (P16) · Lens (P17) · Audience (P18) · Orchestrate (P19) · Cross-Review (P20).
The twenty primitives
| # | Primitive | Closes / does |
|---|---|---|
| P1 | Bridge — Conversation Bridge | Session amnesia. Stop hook → JSONL → docs → vault; capture is automatic. |
| P2 | Gate — Control Gate | Destructive ops the model didn't authorize. PreToolUse hook → .control/policy.yaml; G1–G4 never bypassed. |
| P3 | Tickets — Linear Tickets | Invisible work. Every unit tracked Backlog → Done; no significant work without a ticket. |
| P4 | Pipeline — PR Pipeline | Merging unreviewed code. Branch → PR → CI → merge → deploy; never merge on red. |
| P5 | Fanout — Parallel Agents | Serial bottlenecks. Concurrent isolated agents via worktrees; no shared mutable file writes. |
| P6 | Bookkeeping — Knowledge Bookkeeping | Lost knowledge. Score → promote → entity pages → synthesize. Capture is a reflex, never a question — file it, report after. |
| P7 | Freshness — Skill Freshness Check | Silent skill rot. SessionStart nudge when installed skills are ≥7d stale. Never blocks. |
| P8 | Janitor — Branch + Worktree Janitor | Dead branches/worktrees. make janitor removes squash-merged + orphaned safely; default dry-run. |
| P9 | Wait — Productive Wait | Sleeping on CI. gh pr checks --watch via background; drain a work-queue while blocked. Never sleep. |
| P10 | Hygiene — Worktree Hygiene | Dirty trees. Decide worktree-or-not before the first file; a clean git status is the only reliable reset point. |
| P11 | Empirical — Empirical Feedback | Reasoning mistaken for validation. Validate by interacting — log-tails, E2E, screenshots, deploy verification. |
| P12 | Persist — Persistent Loop | In-context decay on long work (>1h). State lives in the filesystem; each iteration spawns a fresh context. |
| P13 | Dream — Dream Cycle | Dense low-tier signal corrupting sparse high-tier rules. Cross-tier consolidation replays against a frozen substrate (stop-gradient). |
| P14 | Dep-Chain — Dependency-Chain Reasoning | "Think deeply" as ritual. Enumerate upstream + downstream (concrete file paths, function names) in the response — not in your head. |
| P15 | Snapshot — State-Snapshot Before Action | Plans built on stale state. Surface git status + branch + ahead/behind + open PRs + CI/deploy state before planning. |
| P16 | Crystallize — Crystallization (the engine) | Patterns staying in the operator's head. Recurs ≥3× → promote to skill / rule / gate. The meta-primitive that produces the others. |
| P17 | Lens — Lens-Routed Articulation | act as X persona theater. Route input through a lens registry that loads substantive context, not a persona rewrite. |
| P18 | Audience — Format-Follows-Audience | Wrong format by habit. Agent-read → markdown; human-read (specs, reports) → rich HTML. Format follows audience. |
| P19 | Orchestrate — Mechanism Selection | "Continue please" handoffs. Pick the autonomous-continuation mechanism by the 2×2×2 cube before substantive work. |
| P20 | Cross-Review — Cross-Model Adversarial Gate | Single-model echo chambers. The writer cannot be the final judge; fire a cross-model gate (≥7/10) before merging substantive PRs. |
When to use this primer
- You're operating in a bstack-governed workspace and need the primitive contract to reason with.
- Someone references
Pn/ a primitive short-name and you need its meaning + invariant. - You're deciding how to install bstack (answer: clone +
bstack bootstrap, not skills.sh). - You want the discipline without the CLI (this primer is enough to apply the primitives by hand).
The full mechanism specs, the bstack doctor primitive-contract linter, the RCS
control-loop math, and the governance templates all live in the CLI repo
(github.com/broomva/bstack). This primer is the entry point; the substrate is the product.