Gauntlet

Gauntlet is a markdown-only product, proof, and release workflow for Codex. It is for builders who want Codex to carry a change from an idea to verified code and a consistent pull request without a controller or custom runtime.

Its entire operational surface is:

• one short, freely editable policy block for global AGENTS.md; and
• eleven ordinary Codex skill packages.

There is no Gauntlet CLI, library, daemon, hook, installer, receipt, hash manifest, JSON handoff, or evaluation harness.

Workflow

Research
  -> inspect and report

Normal request
  -> Orchestrate -> Verify -> Land -> Ship

Material request
  -> Design and acceptance -> Orchestrate -> Verify -> Land -> Ship

• Design resolves material decisions once and runs the main-agent Product, Engineering, Design, Analytics, QA, and Performance review.
• Orchestrate coordinates implementation when useful while preserving user limits on agents and delegation.
• Test Design chooses owner-boundary proof and gates test authoring and audits after credible failure modes are recorded.
• Verify independently checks every accepted outcome against observable evidence from the exact candidate commit, tree, and checked base.
• Land uses native git and gh to publish, check, directly merge, prove the landed revision, and clean up safely.
• Ship observes declared deployments already triggered by the merge and keeps merge, deployment, and production proof separate.

The policy and skills are instructions, not authenticated enforcement. Their value comes from explicit revision binding, observable proof, and honest limits.

Included skills

Core workflow:

• design
• adversarial-reviewer
• orchestrate
• test-design
• verify
• land
• ship

Focused procedures:

• researcher
• debugger
• refactor-codebase
• refactor-performance

Install or update

1. In ~/.codex/AGENTS.md, replace the entire existing Gauntlet block, including both marker lines, with the full contents of router/AGENTS.md exactly once. If no markers exist, append the source block once. If markers are missing, duplicated, reversed, or nested, inspect and resolve them instead of guessing. Preserve every byte outside the replaced block, including personal response style.
2. For each of the eleven named skills above, create its target directory when needed and copy only its owned SKILL.md into ~/.codex/skills/<name>/. Preserve other files in those directories and every unrelated personal skill.
3. When upgrading from an executable Gauntlet release, inspect and then remove the retired ~/.codex/gauntlet directory and any Gauntlet-owned source hook. Preserve unrelated hook content or a backed-up user hook.
4. Restart or reload Codex.

Global instructions are intentionally user-owned after copying. Editing or removing them is supported; there is no drift check or auto-restoration.

To uninstall, remove only the complete marked Gauntlet block and the eleven owned SKILL.md files. Remove a skill directory only when it is empty; preserve every other file, instruction, and personal skill.

Contributing

This repository intentionally contains no product code or evaluation tooling. For changes, inspect the full diff, run git diff --check, check retained links and references, and exercise changed native Git procedures in disposable repositories. Temporary proof scripts and fixtures stay outside the product.

Additional documentation:

• docs/design-build-verify.md
• docs/meaningful-proof.md
• docs/github-discipline.md

Gauntlet is released under the MIT License.