SDLC Agent-Skill Wiki

stage-release

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Stage: Release

Canonical lifecycle stage: finalize validated work and close the iteration — for most frameworks that means packaging, shipping safely, and keeping it healthy in production (versioning, integration, deployment, launch, observability, and later deprecation/migration); for a spec-first framework it means folding the completed change back into the durable source of truth. Framework-neutral name (was stage-ship, GSD’s term).

Derived projection — evidence is the capabilities that implements: [[stage-release]].

No longer single-framework (updated 2026-07-04). Was the weakest stage (GSD-only); Addy Osmani’s Ship phase adds six capabilities spanning git/versioning, CI/CD, launch, observability, documentation, and deprecation, and OpenSpec adds its finalization step — making release a well-evidenced canonical stage. It is now the broadest activity on the delivery side and a candidate to split (see below).

Two flavors of “release” in the evidence. GSD, Addy, Compound Engineering, and gstack finalize by shipping to production (commit, PR, launch checklist, deploy, announce). OpenSpec finalizes by spec-maintenance — openspec-sync merges the change’s delta into the living spec and openspec-archive retires the change — with no deploy/CI/observability step at all. Same lifecycle slot (deliver completed, validated work), two different terminal acts. gstack (2026-07-05) pushes the ship-to-prod flavor furthest — it is the first framework here to separate deploy from ship as its own command: gstack-ship opens the PR, gstack-land-and-deploy merges + deploys + verifies production health, and gstack-canary monitors post-deploy. That deploy→verify→operate arc is the new evidence strengthening the stage-operate split candidate below. A former third flavor — BMAD’s learning close-out (bmad-retrospective) — was promoted out of this stage on 2026-07-04 into its own stage-learn once Compound Engineering’s ce-compound gave learning-capture a second framework. Extracting reusable lessons is a distinct activity from delivering the work; see stage-learn.

GSD:

Addy Osmani — Agent Skills:

Compound Engineering (ship-to-prod):

OpenSpec (spec-maintenance, not deployment):

gstack (ship-to-prod, with a genuine deploy + operate arc):

Superpowers (ship-to-prod flavor; stops at PR/merge — no deploy):

Cross-framework equivalents

The finalize / close-out cluster spans five frameworks: OpenSpec’s openspec-archive ↔ Addy’s addy-shipping ↔ GSD’s gsd-ship ↔ Compound Engineering’s ce-commit-push-pr ↔ Superpowers’ sp-finishing-a-development-branch — each closes the iteration on a completed unit, but finalizes different things: GSD opens and tracks a PR, Addy fans out parallel review personas for a go/no-go launch, Compound Engineering goes working-changes→PR and (with ce-promote) announces the launch, OpenSpec merges the spec delta and archives the change, and Superpowers presents a merge/PR/keep/discard decision menu and cleans up its worktree accordingly (like GSD and OpenSpec, it stops at PR/merge with no deploy step). Addy’s other five capabilities (versioning, CI/CD, observability, docs, deprecation) still have no counterpart in GSD, MP, OpenSpec, Spec Kit, or BMAD; OpenSpec’s spec-maintenance is unique. Compound Engineering is the closest match to the GSD/Addy ship-to-prod flavor. (These are not set as equivalent_to edges: the terminal acts differ too much to cluster as counterparts.) The former learning close-out flavor (bmad-retrospective) now lives in stage-learn, alongside Compound Engineering’s ce-compound.

Spec Kit ships no release capability (2026-07-04). Like OpenSpec, Spec Kit stops at the validate loop: speckit-converge closes the spec↔code gap by re-planning, but there is no deploy / PR / launch / observability command. Its speckit-taskstoissues pushes tasks to GitHub issues (a stage-plan tracker bridge), not a release act. So Spec Kit adds no backlink here.

Split candidates

stage-operate / stage-maintain (deploy, run it in production, sunset it) — strengthening

  • Distinction: release = ship the work (PR/merge); operate = deploy it and keep it healthy in production (deploy, verify, observability, alerting); maintain = retire/migrate it later. Distinct from opening/merging the PR.
  • Evidence so far (now capability-level in three frameworks, but not yet a distinct phase):
    • Addy folds observability (addy-observability), CI/CD (addy-ci-cd), and deprecation (addy-deprecation) into Ship.
    • Compound Engineering adds post-release monitoring (ce-product-pulse).
    • gstack (2026-07-05) is the first to give deploy its own command (gstack-land-and-deploy) separate from ship, plus a dedicated post-deploy monitor (gstack-canary) and deploy config (gstack-setup-deploy) — a genuine deploy→operate arc. But gstack still nests these under the release/ship end of its sprint rather than naming a standalone Operate phase.
    • So deploy+operate is now a dedicated capability in three frameworks (Addy, CE, gstack) but a distinct phase in none.
  • Decisive trigger: a framework that treats operate/deploy as its own lifecycle phase distinct from release (or a second framework separating deploy into its own command + phase) → clears the bar → split into stage-operate. Watch closely — gstack has brought this from one framework to three at the capability level.

See Also

  • stage-validate · stage-review — the functional and quality gates that must pass before this stage.
  • stage-learn — the sibling close-out stage split out of release (2026-07-04): release delivers the work, learn compounds the lessons.
  • stage-align — the next iteration begins here (reading stage-learn’s output as grounding).

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