great_cto v2.17 - no more tambourine dance

If you've ever spent 20 minutes setting up Claude Code plugins before you could even start working - this update is for you.

One install, everything works.

Previously: install great_cto, then figure out that Superpowers and Beads are also needed, find the repos, clone them, enable them in settings, restart. Classic.

Now - one command:

npx great-cto install

Done. Superpowers and Beads install automatically as companion plugins. They land in ~/.claude/plugins/cache/local/, get enabled in settings.json, and are ready to work. If git is missing - great_cto gives a friendly hint instead of silently failing.

Jurisdiction-aware agents.

The new jurisdictions module detects the context of your project - EU, US, Canada, UK, Australia, and others - and automatically activates the right regulatory reviewer agents.

Working on a fintech product for European users? The EU reviewer turns on automatically. Building for the Canadian market? PIPEDA gets covered. No manual configuration, no trying to remember what applies where.

Eight jurisdictions are currently supported, and the list keeps growing.

Critics before the plan.

The most expensive bugs aren't in the code - they're in the decisions made before coding starts. Three new critic agents now run at the earliest stages of the pipeline, before a single line is written.

Architecture critic catches structural problems that make future work impossible. Coupling that rules out multi-tenancy. An "obvious" O(n²) loop that works fine in dev and falls apart at scale. These aren't bugs - they're constraints that quietly close off entire solution spaces.

Spec critic catches "we solved the wrong problem" - the worst class of bug, because there's no way to unit-test for it. By the time the code works correctly, it may be doing entirely the wrong thing.

Schema critic catches the migration that will deadlock a 50M-row table 10 minutes after deploy. A NOT NULL column without a default. An index added without CONCURRENTLY. The kind of change that looks clean in a code review and becomes an incident.

Previously, critics only appeared starting from Plan stage. Now they cover the three positions where a mistake is most expensive.

llm-leash UI: 16 new features.

llm-leash is the great_cto admin board - a local web UI that shows what your AI agents are doing, what they've spent, what passed review, and what needs your attention. Think of it as a control panel for the agent pipeline.

This release adds 16 new features to the board. The most useful ones:

Cmd-K - global command palette for navigation.
Issues subtab - all security and compliance findings in one place.
Session timeline - visual history of what happened and when.
Topology graph - shows agent dependencies. Useful when you have 5+ parallel agents running.
HITL diff - human-in-the-loop review of agent changes before they're applied.
OPA config - Open Policy Agent integration for compliance rules.
SOC2 export - one-click audit trail for compliance officers.
Rule comparison - compare policy versions side by side.

Companion plugins out of the box.

A bit more detail on how the Superpowers + Beads bundle works, since the architecture is non-obvious.

Superpowers - a methodology plugin. It gives Claude Code skills: /brainstorm, /write-plan, /execute-plan, code review workflow, TDD cycle, parallel agent execution. Without it, Claude acts on vibes. With it - on a structured plan.

Beads - a git-native task tracker. Tasks live as commits, survive session restarts, have dependencies and blockers. Claude creates and closes them autonomously as it works.

great_cto - the orchestration layer. It routes requests to the right agents, enforces reviewers based on archetype and jurisdiction, manages the agent pipeline.

Together: you describe what needs to be done, great_cto breaks it into a plan, Beads tracks it, Superpowers enforces methodology, the right reviewer agents plug in automatically.