What Efficiency Means in v0.35.1
Silver Bullet is an orchestration and enforcement layer around GSD. Its efficiency comes from routing work to the right workflow composition, keeping state in .planning/workflows/<id>.md, and adding only the gates that the task actually needs.
That matters because the expensive failure mode in agentic development is not only token cost. It is doing the wrong amount of process: under-reviewing a risky change, over-processing a typo, losing traceability between spec and PR, or discovering after implementation that the plan never covered an acceptance criterion.
Workflow Fit Table
/silver composes from the available Silver Bullet, GSD, and plugin workflows instead of forcing every request through one fixed pipeline.
| Work Type | Likely Route | Efficiency Gain |
|---|---|---|
| Typo, copy, config, rename | /silver:fast → gsd:fast |
Avoids full planning while still confirming that scope is genuinely trivial. |
| Bounded small change | /silver:fast → gsd:quick with flags |
Uses lightweight discussion, research, or validation only when signals require it, then escalates if scope grows. |
| Clear feature | /silver:feature with GSD discuss, plan, execute, verify |
Keeps GSD as execution engine while SB adds pre-plan gates, artifact review, traceability, and pre-ship checks. |
| Fuzzy feature or new product idea | /silver:clarify or /silver:spec before planning |
Prevents premature implementation by producing explicit scope, assumptions, and acceptance criteria first. |
| External PRD, ticket, Figma, or Google Doc | /silver:ingest → spec artifacts → artifact review |
Preserves source context and marks missing connector data instead of silently inventing requirements. |
| Plan/spec mismatch risk | /silver:validate |
Finds uncovered acceptance criteria, open assumptions, and orphan plan tasks before implementation begins. |
| Bugfix | /silver:bugfix with debug and regression verification |
Spends process on root cause and regression prevention instead of broad feature planning. |
| UI/frontend work | /silver:ui with UI design contract and UI review |
Adds interface-specific design and visual checks that generic execution would miss. |
| Infrastructure, CI/CD, deployment | /silver:devops with blast-radius and IaC quality gates |
Uses risk and environment-promotion controls instead of application-only gates. |
| Release preparation | /silver:release |
Concentrates finalization, docs, CI, artifact alignment, and ship checks at the point they matter. |
Fast Path Without Silent Scope Creep
/silver:fast exists for low-risk and bounded work, but it is not a blanket bypass. Tier 1 routes truly trivial changes to gsd:fast; Tier 2 routes bounded medium changes to gsd:quick with the right flags. If scope expands beyond the fast-path limits, the workflow escalates to silver:feature.
- Good fits: typo fixes, small copy updates, simple config values, one-line renames.
- Medium fits: small logic updates, dependency bumps, or 4–10-file changes where the impact is local and clear.
- Bad fits: schema changes, auth, infrastructure, cross-module behavior, new capabilities, or anything that grows past the original scope.
- The legacy trivial marker is guarded by
trivial-file-guard.sh; current Codex-oriented flows should use/silver:fastinstead.
Dependency Handling
Silver Bullet distinguishes optional enrichment from required execution dependencies. Optional tools can degrade gracefully when unavailable. Required dependencies fail closed so a workflow does not pretend a gate ran when the underlying skill or connector is missing.
The dependency-skill-check.sh hook enforces dependency-skill availability before dependent chains proceed. The ingestion workflow follows the same principle for external connectors: unavailable sources are recorded as explicit missing-artifact blocks rather than converted into hallucinated content.
Project Configuration
Project-level knobs live in .silver-bullet.json and GSD planning configuration. They let the workflow match the project instead of forcing one universal setup.
| Config Surface | What It Controls |
|---|---|
.silver-bullet.json | Project defaults such as verification commands, source file patterns, required planning behavior, deployment checks, and semantic compression settings. |
.planning/config.json | GSD workflow settings, review depth, model profile settings if GSD uses them, and other planning/runtime options owned by GSD. |
silver-bullet.md §10 | User workflow preferences: routing preferences, step-skip decisions, lightweight alternatives, and mode preferences recorded after explicit approval. |
What Is Not Claimed
Silver Bullet v0.35.1 does not provide a generic automatic model-routing advantage over plain GSD. The historical ensure-model-routing.sh hook is disabled and exits as a no-op. GSD may still expose model profiles or model overrides in its own configuration, but that is not a Silver Bullet-over-GSD benefit.
When you need different model behavior, configure it in the active host or in GSD's supported model configuration. Silver Bullet's job is to select, enforce, and trace the workflow path around that execution.