The Gibson

What The Gibson does

The Gibson is a doctrine-and-tooling repository installed into a target project rather than a hosted service. It is deliberately agent-agnostic: the canonical harness is plain Markdown, shell scripts and GitHub Actions, which any runtime, including Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Grok, Hermes and pi, can read and any CI can enforce, with vendor-specific ergonomics kept as thin adapters over that same core. Work moves through a pipeline of plan, decompose into issues, build, test, review, a UI/UX evaluation against live deployments, a security scan, merge, deploy and a retrospective, and it does not stop short of a human gate unless one is required.

Three layers make up the system: doctrine in AGENTS.md and role or job playbooks, deterministic enforcement gates in CI and scripts that do not care who wrote the code, and a versioned memory of lessons, decisions and incidents. Every time the system asks a human for something, the README's Ask Contract requires it to state what it is asking, what it does, why, and the risks, in plain language. The Gibson is described as the harness layer, working alongside a separate project called Mission Control that acts as the runtime control plane deciding who works.

Key features

• Plan-to-ship pipeline with human gates: plan, build, test, review, UI/UX eval, security, deploy
• Agent-agnostic doctrine in plain Markdown, shell scripts and GitHub Actions
• Versioned memory of lessons, decisions and incidents under memory/
• Ask Contract requiring plain-language, risk-stated requests to humans
• Playwright-based UI/UX evaluation against live deployments
• Fork-and-upstream workflow that keeps a customized copy updated

When to use it

• Enforcing one shared, auditable SDLC process across a fleet of different coding agents
• Requiring a human security and UX gate before a deployment ships
• Forking the harness for a team's own conventions while still pulling upstream improvements

Who it is for: Teams running multiple coding agents, including Hermes Agent, who want one enforced software delivery process across all of them.

How it fits with Hermes Agent

Names Hermes Agent as one of the runtimes it is agent-agnostic across, reading the same plain-Markdown doctrine as Claude Code, Codex and Grok.

FAQ