Sota Numerics — Development skill for Claude Code

sota-numerics

SOTA-research/numerical-stability advisory steering across gsd's plan/execute/verify/ship lifecycle, plus a blocking plan:post gate that mechanically enforces a compliant Alternatives Considered section on every plan in a phase

What it does

`sota-numerics` is a [gsd-core](https://github.com/open-gsd/gsd-core) capability — an installable overlay, not a fork — with two distinct halves.

The first half is advisory: it injects SOTA-research, efficiency, and numerical-stability steering fragments at four gsd lifecycle points — the planner at `plan:pre`, the executor at `execute:wave:pre`, the verifier at `execute:wave:post`, and the orchestrator at `ship:pre`.

The second half is not advisory, and is not buried here: a **blocking `plan:post` gate** runs the bundled Alternatives-Considered checker over every `*-PLAN.md` file directly inside a phase directory and fails the plan step when a plan is non-compliant. A compliant plan needs a `## Alternatives Considered` heading (a suffix such as `(REQ-10)` is accepted, but a concatenated heading name is not), at least two bold-named alternatives rendered as either `- **Name**: ...` bullets or Markdown table rows. Each entry's own bullet or table row must carry a URL or backticked doc-ref citation with a year inside the recency window, and a `Decided by:` line naming one of performance, simplicity, LOC, ecosystem, or maintenance as the ranked criterion that decided the pick. A plan making no real mechanism choice may instead write the exemption line `N/A — no mechanism choice` as the whole section body. A present section with no recognized bullet or table-row entries reports `section found but no alternatives parsed`; one recognized entry retains the `fewer than 2 named alternatives (found 1)` diagnostic. This is the complete supported entry grammar, not general Markdown parsing.

Why a gate, not just guidance

This gate exists because of how coding agents fail, not how humans do. The plans it checks ar