Contributors

This section covers GAIA surface that exists in the template repo but is not included in the npx creata-gaia bundle.

Audience: Steven and any outside contributors working on the GAIA template itself.

If you ran npx create-gaia my-app for a scaffolded project, this section is not for you.

Adopter / contributor split

GAIA distinguishes two audiences and routes its surface accordingly. Two release mechanisms strip contributor-only material from the adopter tarball:

1. Path-level exclusion. Entire files and directories listed in .gaia/release-exclude never enter the tarball produced by the GitHub Release workflow. Examples: .claude/commands/gaia-release.md, .gaia/cli/src/, .gaia/cli/health/, wiki/entities/, wiki/meta/.
2. Block-level exclusion. Content between <!-- gaia:maintainer-only:start --> and <!-- gaia:maintainer-only:end --> markers inside files that DO ship. The shipped file is a subset of the source.

Both pass through the bundle-time scrub during release. The on-disk .gaia/release-exclude is the authoritative manifest of path-level rules.

What’s in this section

• /gaia-release: audience scope and what releases produce. The detailed runbook is internal to the maintainer.
• /health-audit: autonomous health audit and auto-heal loop with circuit breakers.
• CLI surface: gaia binary subcommands that contributors invoke directly, plus where their source lives.
• CI workflows: release.yml, cli-tests.yml, distribution.yml, forensics-triage.yml.
• Contributor wiki content: wiki/entities/, wiki/meta/, and the gaia:maintainer-only block convention.

Source-of-truth pointers

• .gaia/release-exclude: path-level exclusion manifest
• gaia/.gaia/cli/src/: CLI source
• gaia/.gaia/cli/health/runbook.md: health audit runbook
• gaia/wiki/entities/, gaia/wiki/meta/: contributor wiki content
• gaia/.github/workflows/: CI workflows (mix of contributor-only and adopter-shipped)