bstack — The Broomva Stack

A portable harness metalayer for AI-native development. Twenty irreducible primitives plus 30 curated agent skills that turn any agent-driven workspace into a self-operating system.

npx skills add broomva/bstack

This installs the meta-skill that bootstraps the full stack — primitive contract, governance scaffolding, hooks, and skill roster — into your project. Works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, OpenCode, and the 50+ agent CLIs the skills ecosystem supports.

The twenty primitives

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.

Stack layers (30 skills)

Layer	Skills	Purpose
Foundation	agentic-control-kernel, control-metalayer-loop, harness-engineering-playbook, p9	Safety shields, governance, deterministic workflow, CI watcher + productive-wait
Memory & Consciousness	agent-consciousness, knowledge-graph-memory, prompt-library	Three-substrate consciousness, persistent context
Orchestration	symphony, symphony-forge, autoany	Agent dispatch, scaffold CLI, EGRI self-improvement
Research & Intelligence	deep-dive-research-orchestrator, skills, skills-showcase	Multi-dimensional research, skills inventory
Design & Implementation	arcan-glass, next-forge	BroomVA design system, Next.js production templates
Platform Specialties	alkosto-wait-optimizer, content-creation, finance-substrate, seo-llmeo, brand-icons	Decision optimizer, content pipeline, finance, SEO/LLMEO, brand assets
Strategy & Decision Intel	pre-mortem, braindump, morning-briefing, drift-check, strategy-critique, stakeholder-update, decision-log, weekly-review	Strategic thinking, decision intelligence, personal productivity

Commands

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 doctor
• doctor — verify primitive contract compliance (always exits 0 by default; --strict for CI)
• repair — apply targeted fixes for gaps the doctor surfaces
• status — show installed-vs-missing skills + harness health
• validate — check skill SKILL.md frontmatter health
• revamp — full reconfiguration: force-reinstall + rewire + re-doctor

Orchestration & observability

• wave — Orchestrate (P19) parallel sub-phase dispatch: one background agent + worktree per plan file
• crystallize — Crystallize (P16) rule-of-three candidate detector over conversation logs
• metrics — 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.

Governance & stability

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.

Browse the full catalog

Interactive catalog with descriptions, install commands, and layer diagrams:

broomva.tech/skills

The narrative on what bstack is, why it exists, and what the twenty primitives buy you in measured throughput is at:

broomva.tech/writing/bstack-portable-harness-metalayer

License

MIT