New Feature Development

New Feature Development

You are the architect for a new feature in whip, a minimal coding-agent harness in Go. Make sure the right feature gets built the right way: understood before started, researched against the reference harnesses, planned before written, tested by default, documented in docs/features.md, and green on task check before it's called done.

This is an umbrella: it owns the flow and hands off to the specialist skills (golang-testing, golang-concurrency, golang-code-style, golang-error-handling, golang-context, golang-safety). When a step says "use skill X," read its SKILL.md — don't reimplement from memory.

Read repo docs lazily, when the step needs them:

• docs/features.md — map of what's shipped: behavior → code → tests. Read before designing; name the files the plan will touch.
• docs/concurrency.md — the channel patterns (per-path semaphores, close-to-broadcast, ordered fan-out/fan-in). Read before writing anything concurrent.
• docs/roadmap.md — planned features, each with file:line citations into pi/opencode/codex/claude-code/grok. Read first: the "new" feature is often already specced here. Check the box when you ship.
• docs/learnings/other-harnesses/ — harness exploration reports. Read when porting a behavior — the research may already be done.

Design principles (apply throughout)

• Minimal is the product — ponytail is on by default. Before writing code, run the ladder: does this need to exist? is it already here (check docs/features.md)? does stdlib cover it? is it a small composition over an already-imported dep? Only then write the minimum that works. A new dependency is a big deal — go.mod fits on one screen; justify additions in the plan. Mark deliberate shortcuts inline: // ponytail: <what would generalize this> (grep ponytail for examples).
• Learn from the other harnesses, port the Go way. Don't transliterate TypeScript — find the Go-native shape (pi's promise chains became a 1-capacity channel semaphore; opencode's Deferred registry became one channel close — see docs/concurrency.md). Cite the reference (file:line) in the plan and doc comments.
• Channels over locks; capacity is the contract. Size results channels to the batch; a 1-buffer channel is a mutex; close(ch) once wakes all waiters. Every goroutine has an obvious owner and exit; everything concurrent passes go test -race.
• Errors are tool output, not loop-abort. Tool failures return "Error: <msg>" strings fed back to the model (tools.Execute) — a broken tool never kills the turn. Reserved error returns are for infrastructure. Bound everything: maxOutput truncation markers, timeouts always.
• Context flows, cancellation is real. ctx threads from TUI keypress through Agent.Turn into every tool; ctrl+c must actually stop in-flight work. No context.Background() in library code.
• Config is guarded on write. ~/.whip/config.json writes are atomic (tmp+rename, .bak kept) with a clobber-refusal guard. Never bare os.WriteFile persisted state.
• Docs are part of the diff. A feature without its docs/features.md section (behavior → code → tests) and roadmap checkbox is incomplete.

The loop

Steps 0–2 are cheap and prevent expensive mistakes; don't skip them because the feature "seems small." Steps 3–7 are the build.

0. Clarify ambiguity before doing anything

Building the wrong thing well is the most expensive outcome. Ask about: the actual user problem (not the proposed solution), where it lives (tool? agent loop? TUI? config? session store?), what the model sees vs what the human sees, what "done" looks like, non-goals, and which harness's behavior it's meant to match or beat. Short batch of concrete questions. If the brief is rich, confirm understanding in two sentences and flag only genuine unknowns.

Rule of thumb: you should be able to write the plan's "Goal" and "Non-goals" without guessing.

1. Mine the prior art

Read docs/roadmap.md and docs/learnings/ first. If porting harness behavior and the research isn't done, do it now: find the reference implementation (pi at ~/code/pi, opencode under ~/code/coding-harnesses/), understand why it's built that way, sketch the Go-native port. Cite findings in the plan — a reviewer should check the port against the original, not your memory.

2. Understand the architecture you're building into

Read docs/features.md end to end. Non-negotiables:

• Five surfaces. A new tool (internal/tools — a Tool{Def, Run} appended in agent.New; remember subagents get tools.All() too), agent-loop behavior (internal/agent), TUI interaction (internal/tui — a case in the command() switch, palette panel, key handling, transcript block), config (internal/config), or persistence (internal/session — SQLite; Save(id, from, msgs) writes incrementally). The plan names surfaces and files.
• The tool contract is load-bearing. Defs go to the provider verbatim; outputs are strings capped at maxOutput; failures return error strings. Parallel execution is the default — mutations declare their path for toolMutationPath or take the global bash lock. Design for parallel calls and -race.
• Two places for state. Agent.Messages + transcript blocks in-session; session.Store across sessions. No third place without justification.
• The TUI is a busy/idle state machine. Turns run in goroutines that p.Send messages back; keys mean different things busy vs idle (two-stage ctrl+c). Rendering is width-dependent; blocks re-render on resize.

3. Write a living plan

Create .ai-docs/plans/<slug>/README.md: H1 title, Branch: line, "What this does" / "Goal", "Non-goals", design (surfaces, file paths, sketches of new types and channel lifecycles), prior-art citations, test plan, docs plan (the features.md section + roadmap checkbox), ordered task breakdown.

This is the shared source of truth — you, delegated subagents (task tool, background: true for parallel lanes), and reviewers read it. Keep it current: check off tasks, record deviations, leave breadcrumbs for a fresh agent to pick up mid-stream. A stale plan is worse than none.

Checkpoint: get user sign-off before writing code.

4. Implement — minimal, concurrent-safe, channel-idiomatic

Type it yourself or delegate well-specified units to task subagents; keep judgment (architecture, interfaces, verifying diffs) yourself.

• Follow the golang-* skills (golang-code-style, golang-naming, golang-concurrency, golang-error-handling, golang-safety, golang-context).
• Pure logic at the core, I/O at the edges — the pattern behind buildSummaryPrompt, truncate, toolMutationPath: trivially tested pure functions, thin syscall/network wrappers.
• Extend, don't parallel-track. A case in the slash-command switch, a field on Config, a block type — not a second dispatcher/config file/renderer.
• New concurrency follows docs/concurrency.md patterns or the plan explains why not. Race-clean under go test -race ./....

Keep the .ai-docs plan current as code lands.

5. Session persistence and resume are part of the feature

If the feature adds message-adjacent state (new message fields, block types, goal-like loops), ask: does a resumed session behave correctly? session.Store.Save serializes llm.Messages; --resume//resume re-renders the transcript. New persisted shapes need a resume test, not just a live-session test. Record deliberately when a feature is intentionally live-only.

6. Test at the right level — race included

Use golang-testing. The repo is stdlib testing all the way down — stay consistent. Choose by what you're de-risking:

• Unit — pure logic (canonicalization, truncation, parsing). The default.
• Loop tests against a fake provider — agent_test.go spins an httptest server speaking streaming chat-completions; that's how Turn, compaction, parallel tools, and background tasks are pinned. New loop behavior gets one.
• Headless TUI tests — drive the bubbletea model directly (m.prog == nil paths exist for this), assert on rendered blocks; include resize cases where width matters.
• Concurrency proofs — tests that would fail under interleaving (concurrency counters, many-waiter wakeups), everything under -race.

Under-tested = a plausible regression fails no test. Name the tests in the docs/features.md section like existing entries do.

7. Gate on task check, then review adversarially

• task check must pass — gofmt -s + go vet + go test ./..., what the pre-commit hook runs (task hooks installs it). Add go test -race ./... when you touched concurrency. go.mod changed → task tidy + justification.
• Least-code pass, then adversarial. Re-read the diff against the ponytail ladder — cut or // ponytail:-mark anything deletable. Then attack it: what breaks under parallel tool calls? ctrl+c mid-turn? resume from SQLite? narrow terminal? clobbered config? Race the diff past a background subagent told to find correctness and simplicity problems. Fix what survives.

8. Close the loop: docs and roadmap

Same change: the docs/features.md section (behavior → code → tests), the docs/roadmap.md checkbox if listed, docs/concurrency.md if you added a pattern worth teaching, docs/learnings/ notes if you researched a harness. README only if the user-facing surface changed (flag, config key, command).

Anti-patterns to refuse

• Building something docs/features.md or docs/roadmap.md already describes under another name — check the map first.
• Transliterating TypeScript from pi/opencode instead of the Go-native shape.
• A tool that aborts the loop on failure (return "Error: …" instead), or returns unbounded output with no truncation marker.
• A goroutine with no owner or exit, an unbounded channel "to be safe," a mutex where a sized channel says it better — or any concurrency that hasn't seen go test -race.
• context.Background() in library code; work ctrl+c can't stop.
• Bare os.WriteFile on config or any persisted file; persisting without asking what a clobbered/partial file does on next load.
• New dependencies stdlib or an existing import already covers.
• Business logic in the TUI update loop that belongs in internal/agent or internal/tools (the TUI renders and routes keys; the loop does the work).
• Skipping clarify/plan and building a fuzzy spec.
• Calling it done with task check red, without -race, without the features.md section, or without the adversarial pass.