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Platform support: adding OpenAI Codex and Google Antigravity / Gemini CLI

Research and decision record for extending this template beyond claude and copilot. Written before any platform-specific implementation, so the design rests on what the vendors actually document rather than on assumption.

Status: accepted (Option B), implemented and merged on 2026-07-27. The Copilot cloud-agent and IDE-agent-mode probes (§7) were deliberately merged ahead of — not instead of. If either comes back negative, the fix is additive and does not touch the canonical bundle: generate .github/skills/ticket-*/ routers pointing at .agents/skills/, exactly as the other platforms already do. Nothing needs unwinding. Researched against the sources listed at the bottom.

1. What each platform actually reads

Project-scoped paths only (user-level paths exist everywhere but can't ship in a repo bundle). Every path below is quoted from vendor documentation.

Claude Code GitHub Copilot OpenAI Codex Antigravity Gemini CLI
Skills (SKILL.md folders) .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md .github/skills/, .claude/skills/, or .agents/skills/ .agents/skills only (cwd → repo root) .agents/skills/<name>/SKILL.md (legacy .agent/skills) .gemini/skills/ or .agents/skills/ (the .agents alias wins)
User-invocable commands skill name or .claude/commands/*.md → /name user-invocable skill → /name $skill in the CLI, @skill in ChatGPT — no project-level slash commands (~/.codex/prompts/ is deprecated and global-only) .agents/workflows/<name>.md → /name, frontmatter description: .gemini/commands/<name>.toml → /name (prompt, description, {{args}})
Subagents .claude/agents/<name>.md (YAML: name, description, tools) .github/agents/<name>.agent.md .codex/agents/<name>.toml (TOML: name, description, developer_instructions) .agents/agents/<name>.md (YAML incl. subagent: true) .gemini/agents/<name>.md (YAML: name, description, tools)
Dispatch model model picks by description inference, /agent, or explicit explicit delegation only — "Codex does not auto-spawn custom subagents" planner delegates via invoke_subagent model picks by description
Root context file CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md AGENTS.md AGENTS.md / GEMINI.md, plus .agents/rules/ (legacy .agent/rules) GEMINI.md, or AGENTS.md via context.fileName
Structured-choice gate tool AskUserQuestion none — numbered list none — numbered list none — numbered list none — numbered list
Size limits on prompt files none documented none documented none documented 12,000 chars per rule and per workflow file (skills exempt) none documented

Skills themselves are the same artifact everywhere: the Agent Skills open standard — a folder with a SKILL.md carrying at minimum name and description. Anthropic released the format; Codex, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Copilot, Cursor and ~40 others implement it. A skill body written once is portable across all five platforms without modification.

2. The five findings that constrain the design

1. Codex and Antigravity are hard-wired to the same directory. Neither reads a vendor-private skills folder — Codex reads only .agents/skills, and Antigravity defaults to .agents/skills. A "one isolated bundle per vendor" design in the current style (.codex/, .antigravity/) is not implementable: the two platforms would have to share .agents/skills/ or go without skills.

2. That same directory is also read by Copilot and Gemini CLI. Copilot accepts .agents/skills; Gemini CLI accepts it and gives it precedence over its own .gemini/skills. So .agents/skills/ is a single surface serving four of the five platforms — Claude Code is the only one that needs its own path.

3. Two bundles installed side by side would collide on Copilot. Copilot reads .github/skills and .agents/skills. A repo carrying both today's .github/ bundle and a new .agents/ bundle presents Copilot two ticket-pick skills backed by two different config.yaml files. Whatever we ship must make "install both" impossible or clearly forbidden.

4. All four non-Claude platforms share one gate mechanism. None of Codex, Antigravity, or Gemini CLI exposes a structured-choice tool to a prompt file, so the numbered-list gate the .github/ bundle already uses transfers verbatim. The AskUserQuestion fork stays exactly where it is: Claude only. In other words, the existing .github/ content is already ~95% of the Codex / Antigravity / Gemini CLI bundle — the deltas are paths, command spelling, and agent-file format, which is precisely what check-bundle-sync.sh already normalizes.

5. Entry points and subagents are the only genuinely per-platform artifacts. They are small, and each has an escape hatch:

  • Commands. Codex has no project slash commands at all (deprecated, global-only prompts) — the entry point there is $ticket-pick, i.e. the skill itself. Antigravity needs a .agents/workflows/ticket-pick.md, Gemini CLI a .gemini/commands/ticket-pick.toml. Both must be stubs that delegate to the skill, not copies: Antigravity caps workflow files at 12,000 characters and our engine is 56,838, ticket-new 27,159, ticket-init 27,101, ticket-pick 21,026.
  • Subagents. Four incompatible container formats (Claude MD, Copilot .agent.md, Codex TOML, Antigravity/Gemini MD) around identical prose. One canonical body plus three thin wrappers ("read <canonical> and follow it as your operating instructions") keeps the review-agent logic single-sourced and keeps the equivalence gate meaningful.

3. Options considered

A — four isolated bundles B — shared .agents/ core, Copilot migrates onto it C — .agents/ as a third bundle, .github/ untouched
Canonical copies of the workflow logic 4 2 (.claude/ + .agents/) 3
Feasible? No — finding 1 Yes Yes
Copilot collision risk (finding 3) n/a none — one home real, mitigated only by docs
Sync gate 4-way, ~92 pairs 2-way, unchanged shape 3-way, ~69 pairs
Breaks existing Copilot installs — No (their copies keep working); template stops shipping .github/ No
Per-round maintenance cost 4× every edit 2× every edit (today's cost) 3× every edit

Option A is listed only to record that it was ruled out on evidence, not taste.

4. Decision — Option B

Ship two bundles, as today, and let the second one serve every AGENTS.md-class assistant:

  • .claude/ — Claude Code. Unchanged.
  • .agents/ + AGENTS.md — Codex, Antigravity, Gemini CLI, and Copilot. This is today's .github/ bundle, relocated and given per-platform entry-point adapters.

Rationale: it is the only option that keeps the maintenance cost at exactly what it is today (2× per edit) while covering five platforms, it removes the Copilot double-install hazard by construction, and it preserves the "copy one folder" promise — the folder is just named .agents/ instead of .github/.

Cost of B over C: Copilot users updating an old copy must move .github/skills → .agents/skills and .github/config.yaml → .agents/config.yaml. That is a mechanical move, and the README's "update to the latest version" prompt is the natural place to describe it.

Proposed layout

AGENTS.md                            root context file — read by Codex,
                                     Antigravity, Copilot; Gemini CLI via
                                     context.fileName: ["AGENTS.md", …]
.agents/
├── README.md
├── config.yaml                      generated by init (was .github/config.yaml)
├── skills/                          THE workflow — portable, unmodified, on
│   ├── ticket-{init,new,refine,pick,review,reject,close}/SKILL.md
│   ├── ticket-engine/SKILL.md       internal
│   ├── milestone-sync/SKILL.md      internal
│   └── grill-me/SKILL.md
├── agents/                          canonical review-agent bodies
│   └── {challenger,code-reviewer,code-challenger,…}.md
│                                    ↳ also Antigravity's native subagent path
│                                      (add `subagent: true` to frontmatter)
├── workflows/                       Antigravity slash commands — stubs only
│   └── ticket-pick.md → "follow .agents/skills/ticket-pick/SKILL.md"
├── scripts/                         te CLI + lib (moved verbatim)
└── references/                      init phase references + agent anatomy/kinds
.gemini/
├── commands/ticket-*.toml           Gemini CLI slash commands — stubs
└── agents/*.md                      wrapper → .agents/agents/<name>.md
.codex/
└── agents/*.toml                    wrapper → .agents/agents/<name>.md
.github/
└── agents/*.agent.md                Copilot subagents — wrapper (kept; Copilot
                                     has no .agents/agents equivalent)

Everything under .gemini/, .codex/, and .github/agents/ is generated adapters, not logic: a few lines each, all pointing back into .agents/. /ticket:init gains one question — which assistants use this repo? — and writes only the adapters that are needed, including for research agents it generates.

As built: the assistant running init is always served; the user picks the others (detected footprints are flagged, never preselected), and the question is asked again on every update. Routers are written by the bundle's own te routers write — the same emitter scripts/gen-adapters.sh delegates to. When the other bundle is installed, its config, agents and manifest are emitted too; otherwise the assistant is recorded pending-bundle and the next update emits for it. See /ticket:init § Serving several assistants.

What changes in the sync gate

check-bundle-sync.sh keeps its two-column shape; only the right-hand paths change (.github/skills/ticket-*/SKILL.md → .agents/skills/…). New coverage entries are needed for the adapter directories, and the equivalence check should be extended to assert that every adapter is a pure delegation stub (no logic), which is a cheap grep-shaped rule rather than a new mirror.

5. Risks and open items

Risk Assessment
Codex never auto-delegates to subagents Documented behavior, not a bug. The pick skill's step 5.5 must issue an explicit delegation instruction on Codex ("spawn the code-reviewer agent…"), which is also how it reads today. Low impact.
Antigravity's .agent/ → .agents/ rename Docs state .agents/ is the default with backward support for .agent/. Ship .agents/; no dual-write.
Gemini CLI needs opt-in to read AGENTS.md It defaults to GEMINI.md; context.fileName accepts ["AGENTS.md", …]. Init should offer to write .gemini/settings.json, or ship a one-line GEMINI.md that points at AGENTS.md. Resolved: te routers write creates .gemini/settings.json when Gemini CLI is served and the file is absent, and never rewrites an existing one — it prints what to add instead.
Antigravity 12k-char cap Applies to workflows and rules only; skills are exempt. The stub design already respects it — but no stub may ever inline a step.
Codex TOML subagents are a fourth format Wrapper-only, ~6 lines each; developer_instructions points at the canonical body.
Copilot cloud agent path support Docs list .agents/skills for agent skills generally and name the cloud agent among supported surfaces, but do not map path→surface explicitly. Open — the CLI surface is proven end-to-end, cloud and IDE agent mode are not. Remedy if it fails: add generated .github/skills/ routers (additive, ~8 files).
.agents/agents/ vs .agents/skills/ confusion Cosmetic; both are Antigravity's own names. Documented in the bundle README.

6. How "it works on every provider" stays true

Three layers, in decreasing order of how often they run and increasing order of what they prove:

  1. scripts/gen-adapters.sh --check (every commit, via the sync gate) — the per-platform entry points are generated, so they cannot be hand-edited into drift; they can only go stale, and this catches that. The subagent routers are delegated to the bundle's te routers check, the same emitter /ticket:init uses in a target project.
  2. scripts/test-adapters.sh (every commit + CI, free, offline) — ~480 assertions, each encoding a documented vendor requirement from §1: skill depth and frontmatter, Codex's TOML keys and its no-auto-delegation rule, Antigravity's subagent: true and 12,000-character cap, Gemini's prompt / {{args}} / context.fileName, Copilot's .agent.md shape, Claude's counterpart surface, a hard limit on router size so no router can grow logic, and every frontmatter block re-parsed through a real YAML engine (not the script's own naive substring extractor) so a value a strict loader would reject — an unquoted [hint], a bare key: inside a description — fails here instead of on a user's machine. A failure names the provider it breaks. Mutation-tested: renaming a skill, deleting a router, dropping subagent: true, dropping {{args}}, or growing a workflow past the cap each turn it red.
  3. scripts/live-provider-check.sh --go [--functional] (by hand, costs tokens) — copies the bundle into a throwaway repo without a config.yaml and asks each installed assistant to (1) list its skills and (2) actually run ticket-review. Stage 2 is the real end-to-end proof: the correct answer, "run ticket-init first", is only knowable by having discovered the skill, followed its engine dependency, and read the failure contract. Providers with no headless CLI print a manual checklist instead.

What no amount of local testing can cover: a vendor silently changing its discovery paths. That is what layer 3 is for — re-run it when a provider ships a major version, and update the table below.

7. Verification log

Probe repo: three canary skills, one per candidate directory (.agents/skills/canary-agents/, .github/skills/canary-github/, .claude/skills/canary-claude/), each a SKILL.md whose body returns a distinct token. Each assistant was asked to list the skills already loaded into its context, without reading files itself.

Surface .agents/skills Result How
Codex CLI yes Canary probe: loaded canary-agents only — canary-github and canary-claude absent, matching the documented ".agents/skills only". Against the real bundle: all 8 user-invocable skills discovered, and ticket-review ran end-to-end in a config-less repo and correctly asked for init. live-provider-check.sh --go --functional, 2026-07-27
Copilot CLI yes Canary probe: loaded all three project canaries, .agents/skills among them. Against the real bundle: all 8 skills discovered, ticket-engine correctly internal, five review agents registered, and the functional stage passed. live-provider-check.sh --go --functional, 2026-07-27
Copilot cloud agent unverified The one gate left before this branch merges. Push the probe repo, assign an issue to Copilot, ask it to list its skills
Copilot in VS Code / JetBrains agent mode unverified Same gate. Open the probe repo in agent mode, ask it to list its skills
Antigravity unverified — docs only Not installed locally; the IDE has no headless mode, so this one is manual by nature. The Antigravity checklist printed by scripts/live-provider-check.sh
Gemini CLI unverified — docs only CLI not installed locally (npm i -g @google/gemini-cli + a Google login would close this). Docs additionally promise .agents/skills precedence over .gemini/skills. scripts/live-provider-check.sh --go --only gemini

Everything unverified above is documented vendor behavior, not guesswork — the gate exists because a shipped template that silently loses its workflow on one surface is worse than a week's delay.

8. Sources