fhidalgodev/dsh-odoo-sdd

Spec-Driven Development for Odoo

---

⚡ Summary

dsh-odoo-sdd turns DeepSeek Harness into a specification-driven (SDD) Odoo development pipeline. Two ideas hold it together:

• Closed feedback loop — the agent installs and upgrades modules, reads the server traceback and retries against a real, running Odoo instance. The plugin never starts Docker or odoo-bin: you point it at an instance you already have (dev/staging) through a gitignored .env, and the tools speak plain JSON-RPC.
• Pipeline safety — every phase persists to disk, the gates are fail-closed on an explicit APPROVED marker, three consecutive failures force a root-cause diagnosis, verify/fix iterations are capped, stop.md halts everything, and verdicts are honest: a failed verification is persisted as FAILED and can never be reported as success.
• No change without a spec — a request that arrives after the pipeline closed ("now also change X" in the same chat) is a new change, so it gets its own (small) spec or an explicit waiver from you. The guard covers instance mutations and source edits alike, and says which of the three ways out is available instead of quietly editing.

[!NOTE] What it is not: an infrastructure orchestrator, a credential manager over chat, or an auto-committer. It writes no commit and never asks you for a password.

Requirements

Need	Why
DSH ≥ 0.1.2-rc.1 on Node ≥ 20	the plugin mounts as a Cordis bundle and uses the tools service
An existing Odoo instance reachable over HTTP(S)	the loop needs a real server to install into and read tracebacks from
A disposable dev/staging database	verification installs modules and writes test data
(optional) a Playwright browser tool	only for the UI layer of verification; without it those scenarios are marked for manual checking

---

🔭 How it works

graph TD
    A(["Idea or request"]) --> C1

    subgraph P [SDD protocol - fail-closed gates]
        C1["1 CLARIFY<br/>interview and security questions"] --> R2["2 READ_SPEC<br/>immutable spec.md"]
        R2 -->|APPROVED| A3["3 ARCHITECTURE<br/>models, views, security, test plan"]
        A3 -->|APPROVED| W4["4 WRITE_CODE<br/>module source and OCA docs"]
        W4 --> V5["5 VERIFY<br/>static, install, RPC, UI"]
        V5 -->|PASSED| D9(["handoff.md - DONE"])
        V5 -->|FAILED| F6["FIX_LOOP<br/>root cause, max 5 iterations"]
        F6 --> V5
    end

    subgraph L [Closed loop against a real instance]
        W4 -.-> M7["odoo_module install or upgrade"]
        M7 -.->|traceback| E8["odoo_errors"]
        E8 -.-> F6
    end

    style P fill:#1e1e2e,stroke:#89b4fa,stroke-width:2px,color:#cdd6f4
    style L fill:#181825,stroke:#a6e3a1,stroke-width:2px,color:#cdd6f4

The specification is the single source of truth and it is immutable: the code adapts to the spec, never the other way around. Gates are human-answered by default, and can be delegated to a human-proxy agent when you choose the autonomous mode.

---

✨ Key features

• 🎯 Spec before code, always. spec.md carries numbered acceptance criteria; DONE is unreachable without a persisted PASSED verdict on disk.
• 🔁 A real feedback loop. odoo_module install returns the server's own output or traceback; odoo_errors reads ir.logging; failures become a persisted FAILED verdict instead of a hopeful summary.
• 🧾 Not only modules. The same machine also runs a functional spec (mode=functional): configure a live instance and load data in human-approved batches, with Odoo's own importer for CSV/Excel, and close with a runbook a person can repeat. → The functional path
• 🔒 Credentials are not consent. The first socket of a project needs an explicit human authorization bound to url + db + user (.sdd/grants.json).
• ⏪ Rollback that tells the truth. Checkpoints snapshot files and journal every odoo_execute pre-image, and a restore always reports the files created after the checkpoint. What it cannot undo, it says so.
• 🧱 Documentation as a gate. odoo_docs produces the OCA readme/ fragments, the Apps index.html and a mandatory changelog entry — and it works on an existing module with no spec, no phase and no instance.
• 🧪 Instance-free static layers. odoo_validate (structure + ACL coherence) and odoo_security_scan (raw SQL, sudo(), auth="none", QWeb t-raw…) give findings with file:line before anything is installed.
• 🧑⚖️ Policy the model cannot relax. Allowlist, guards and delegation mode all require native human approval to change.
• 🤖 Supervised or autonomous. The same pipeline runs with a human answering each gate, or with a human-proxy agent and unattended goal rounds until DONE or BLOCKED.
• 📁 Specs where you want them. Keep them beside each project, or collect every project's specs in one folder you can search.
• 🖥️ Linux, macOS and Windows. Paths, atomic writes and .env permissions are handled per platform and tested on Windows in CI.

---

🚀 Quick start

1. Install into a profile

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-odoo-sdd

That installs the published package from the npm registry — no clone, no build, nothing to compile on your side. dsh plugin is a thin pnpm forwarder: it runs pnpm add inside the profile directory and then registers the bundle (dsh.profile.bundles). Two consequences worth knowing:

• pnpm must be on your PATH (dsh plugin reports it when it is not).
• Any pnpm spec works, so you can pin a version: dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-odoo-sdd@0.7.2.

Prefer plain npm — a project that depends on the plugin, or a CI job?

npm install dsh-odoo-sdd        # 0.7.2, published with a provenance attestation

[!IMPORTANT] Restart DSH and refresh the browser tab after installing. Client-side changes (the Odoo SDD settings panel) load from the installed package.

Working on the plugin itself? Install the checkout instead. lib/ is build output and is not committed; npm install builds it through the prepare hook, and you can always ask for it explicitly:

git clone https://github.com/fhidalgodev/dsh-odoo-sdd && cd dsh-odoo-sdd
npm install          # devDependencies: typescript, then prepare builds lib/
npm run host:deps    # optional peers, needed to compile (no-save)
npm run build        # emits lib/ — required, package main is lib/index.js
dsh plugin --profile odoo add .

[!NOTE] A git install runs that prepare build on the consumer's machine, and pnpm blocks dependency build scripts until they are allowed: the command tells you the exact key to add under allowBuilds in the profile's pnpm-workspace.yaml. A registry install needs none of that — the tarball already ships lib/.

dsh plugin add records the bundle in the profile's package.json (dsh.profile.bundles), and the package ships a Cordis patch (cordis.patch.yml) that inserts its own row — so there is no manual composition step. dsh --profile <name> --dump-config prints the composed tree without booting anything.

2. Give it credentials (once per project)

Ask the agent to run odoo_setup mode=check. It writes a secret-free scaffold and you fill the password yourself:

odoo_setup mode=interactive url=http://localhost:8069 db=odoo_dev username=admin
# then fill ODOO_PASSWORD (an Odoo API key is recommended) in the printed file
odoo_setup mode=authorize   # asks YOU, once, to authorize that exact target

Or do it by hand — the plugin looks for the first of these that exists:

#	Location	Scope
1	ODOO_SDD_ENV_FILE	explicit environment override
2	<project>/.sdd/instances/<name>.env	one target per file, the active instance
3	<project>/.sdd/.env	single-target layout (also listed as the instance default)
4	~/.config/dsh-odoo-sdd/.env (honors $XDG_CONFIG_HOME)	user scope — one set of dev credentials for every project
5	<project>/.env	legacy location, still supported (reported as legacy)

Several targets in one project. A workspace that needs a local CE server, a staging EE server and a client's instance no longer overwrites its only .env: each target gets its own file under .sdd/instances/, and one is active.

odoo_setup mode=instance instance=list                      # what exists, non-secret identity
odoo_setup mode=instance instance=add name=staging url=https://stg.example.com db=stg username=ci
# fill ODOO_PASSWORD in .sdd/instances/staging.env by hand, then:
odoo_setup mode=authorize                                   # grants THIS target
odoo_setup mode=instance instance=use name=staging           # activate it
odoo_setup mode=instance instance=remove name=staging        # needs confirm_destructive=true

Authorization is per target (url+db+user), so two instances on the same server are two grants. Activating an instance that has no live grant is refused: the pointer decides where mutations go, so it cannot be switched to a target nobody approved. With several instances and none active, every connection tool refuses instead of picking one by order — and an old .sdd/.env keeps working untouched as default until you choose to move it yourself.

mkdir -p ~/.config/dsh-odoo-sdd && cd ~/.config/dsh-odoo-sdd
cp <plugin>/.env.example .env && chmod 600 .env
# fill: ODOO_URL, ODOO_DB, ODOO_USERNAME, ODOO_PASSWORD

[!WARNING] Never paste a password into the chat, a spec, a commit or an issue. The plugin refuses a group/world-readable .env, redacts the secret from every tool output, and stores session cookies in .sdd/session.json (mode 600) without ever returning them to the model.

3. Ask for the thing you want

Implement a sale order approval module for Odoo 19, using the SDD workflow.

The agent picks up odoo-sdd-workflow from the session skill catalog and follows the protocol. If you want to be explicit — or you want to be sure the full instructions are loaded — start your message with /odoo-sdd-workflow.

For configuration and data work on a running instance, ask for that instead:

Set up company, taxes and chart of accounts in my dev instance, then import
this customers.csv — functional SDD, dev environment, no production.

That selects odoo-functional-sdd (or /odoo-functional-sdd explicitly) and the functional spec mode described below.

---

🧭 The five phases

Phase	What happens	Gate to leave it
CLARIFY	Intent recorded (mode create/bug, licensed) and the security interview answered: groups, ACLs, record rules, sudo() justification, public routes	sdd_phase clarify
READ_SPEC	spec.md is assimilated: business context, numbered acceptance criteria, constraints, target Odoo version. Writing code here is forbidden.	APPROVED + mark_spec_loaded
ARCHITECTURE	Models, views (including extra view types and a search view where they matter), reports, security matrix and test-plan.md	APPROVED
WRITE_CODE	The module is implemented with version-pinned Odoo patterns and its OCA documentation	static gates green
VERIFY	Ascending pyramid: static → install/upgrade → RPC/data → UI (Playwright) only for critical flows	persisted PASSED verdict
FIX_LOOP	Root-cause fixes. 3 consecutive failures force a consultant diagnosis; 5 iterations force BLOCKED	honest verdict

In ARCHITECTURE the agent also asks about the things that are cheap to decide early and expensive to discover late: extra view types beyond form/tree (including a search view for how a model is searched — custom filters, favorites), reports (PDF via ir.actions.report/QWeb, SQL, CSV/XLSX, an external tool), web tours (onboarding, test, or none — with the asset bundle that loads them, because a tour no bundle loads never runs) and demo data (which files, and what for). Each one is answered explicitly — "form + tree only", "no reports needed", "no tours needed", "no demo data". Those are guide decisions: recorded in ## Views / ## Reports / ## Tours / ## Demo data and surfaced as warnings in sdd_phase status, non-blocking by design — the security model is the only fail-closed content gate. The version-by-version tour API, the HttpCase that executes a tour and the demo traps live in resources/references/tours-and-demo.md.

Per-spec artifacts (all on disk, resumable):

specs/<NNN>-<slug>/
├── spec.md · architecture.md · test-plan.md
├── verify-verdict.txt   # honest persisted verdict
├── state.json           # phase, failures, iterations
├── kb.json              # decisions, discarded options, blockers, diagnoses
├── docs-report.md · security-report.md
└── handoff.md           # written by sdd_handoff when the run closes

---

🧩 The functional path (configure and import)

Not every Odoo job is code. Setting up a company, its taxes, its users and its master data is configuration and data, and it happens on a live instance — where a wrong click is not a failed test but a real record. The same SDD machine covers it with a different middle phase and stricter closing rules.

graph TD
    C1["1 CLARIFY<br/>objective, instance, ENVIRONMENT"] --> R2["2 READ_SPEC<br/>spec.md, criteria, sources"]
    R2 -->|APPROVED| A3["3 ARCHITECTURE<br/>to-be process, batches, risks"]
    A3 -->|APPROVED| X4["4 APPLY_CONFIG<br/>discovery + approved batches"]
    X4 --> V5["5 VERIFY<br/>re-read the records, evidence per AC"]
    V5 -->|PASSED| D9(["runbook.md + handoff.md - DONE"])
    V5 -->|FAILED| F6["FIX_LOOP"]
    F6 --> X4

    style X4 fill:#1e1e2e,stroke:#f9e2af,stroke-width:2px,color:#cdd6f4

	Development run	Functional run
Chosen at CLARIFY	mode=create or mode=bug	mode=functional
Middle phase	WRITE_CODE (module source)	APPLY_CONFIG (batches against the instance)
Deliverable	module + OCA docs	configured instance + functional-runbook.md
Skill	odoo-sdd-workflow	odoo-functional-sdd

How a change reaches the instance. Nothing is written "to see what happens":

1. Discovery first, under its OWN approval: which models, which fields, how many records. Reads are not mutations, but an approved scope is what stops "just looking around" from turning into a change.
2. Plan: the design becomes batches. Each one declares its destination and environment, the version and capabilities used, company and context, the acceptance criteria it covers, its ordered operations, record identity, preconditions, expected result, risks, recovery and manual steps.
3. Approve: the human sees the exact batch and approves it through the native approval seam. The receipt is bound to the hashes of the spec, the design, the plan and the batch — change any of them and the approval is void.
4. Apply: one operation at a time, re-checking those hashes, persisting each operation's state before the call and after the result.
5. An unknown outcome is not a retry. A timeout after a mutation may mean Odoo already committed, so the operation is marked indeterminate, the batch stops and the run parks until a human reconciles it.
6. Close honestly: sdd_phase succeed demands an explicit pass per acceptance criterion, the security review is mandatory, and so is the runbook (who does it, in which company, prerequisites, the verified menu path, the steps with their field labels, the expected result, how to check it and how to undo it) — whatever the documentation policy says.

The environment is declared, never assumed. ODOO_SDD_ENVIRONMENT on the target says dev, staging or production. A plan that declares a different environment than the target is refused (environment-mismatch), an undeclared target asks for it (NEEDS_ENVIRONMENT), and production additionally needs a declared backup reference plus its own approval. High-risk changes are proven in staging first.

Imports go through Odoo's importer, never through a hand-written parser:

odoo_import use=prepare file=... model=res.partner   # uploads, with its own approval
odoo_import use=preview   ...                        # what ODOO read: sheets, headers, sample
odoo_import use=map       ...                        # one decision per column, no blanks
odoo_import use=plan      ...                        # becomes an `apply` batch
odoo_functional operation=approve / apply            # the batch path, unchanged

The version contract is explicit (majors 10–19: file/import_id + JSONP on the old endpoint, ufile/id + JSON on the new one, do/execute_import for the apply), and a version outside the verified families is refused with what to investigate instead of guessed. A file that changed after the upload invalidates the mapping; a nextrow in the answer means the importer stopped mid-file and is reported as partial, never as success — and the rows it counted are never re-sent. The session cookie stays in .sdd/session.json (mode 600) and out of every tool result.

[!NOTE] The functional path needs an instance, and the importer needs a web session: run odoo_session once before odoo_import use=prepare.

---

🧰 The 15 tools

Tool	Purpose
odoo_connect	Probe the instance: server version + authentication. Masked report; distinguishes NEEDS_SETUP / NEEDS_SECRET / DEFERRED / SKIPPED states (never asks for secrets in chat).
odoo_setup	Onboarding: check (cascade + gitignore + delegation mode), interactive (secret-free chmod-600 scaffold), authorize (ask the DEVELOPER, through native approval, for a connection grant bound to the current url/db/user), revoke (drop the grants), purge (plan first, then — with confirm_destructive=true plus human approval — remove only the plugin's own state under .sdd/), later, skip, reset, autonomy (supervised | autonomous, human-approved). Secrets are never accepted as parameters.
odoo_module	info / install / upgrade on ir.module.module (button_immediate_*). Returns the server's own output or traceback, redacted — the closed feedback loop.
odoo_execute	Generic RPC (execute_kw) against the instance: any public method of any model is callable, and what it needs is decided by what it is. READS (search, search_read, search_count, read, read_group, fields_get, name_get, name_search, default_get, exists, check_access_rights, check_access_rule) run freely, with fields/limit/order/offset for projection and paging (a fractional or negative offset is refused, never clamped); CRUD mutations (create/write/unlink) require confirm_destructive=true AND the model in executeAllowlist, and are journaled so the data undo can replay them; every business action (action_*, button_*, do_*…, e.g. confirming an order) runs with confirm_destructive=true and no allowlist, because the plugin cannot replay its effect — it is never journaled, no undo exists for it, and a timeout is reported as an INDETERMINATE outcome instead of a plain failure — the same rule now applies to CRUD, because a create whose answer never arrived may already have committed and reporting it as a retryable failure is how one effect becomes two. Declare precondition/postcondition (the same shape a batch uses: {domain, expect, count}) to carry a state guard before the call and a state proof after it: if the precondition fails, nothing is sent; if the postcondition fails, the answer says the call WAS sent and the instance may be half-changed, and the CRUD mutation keeps its journal receipt (created id + pre-image) so it can still be compensated; without one, OK only means the server accepted the call. A private method (_name) is refused, and that wall is Odoo's own: execute_kw dispatches through get_public_method, which answers AccessError for _…, init, @api.private and the internal attribute names — so read the model in the source (the native/custom repositories are reported by odoo_config mode=read) and call the public button or action that wraps it (sale.order._create_invoices is private; the sale.advance.payment.inv wizard exposes the public create_invoices()). For several operations, or when a human approval per run is wanted, use a functional batch with kind: "method". context is forwarded verbatim — use allowed_company_ids/company_id on multi-company instances — and the server still applies its own ACL. A large answer is BOUNDED and the cut is MARKED: the text says how many characters were dropped, that what you see is the beginning (not a complete JSON document) and how to page with fields/limit/offset — and for a mutation it explicitly forbids repeating the call to get more text.
odoo_validate	LOCAL, instance-free module structure check: __manifest__.py present + depends, declared data XML files exist, security/ir.model.access.csv when models are declared. Returns file:line findings plus the module_dir and project root it resolved (a relative path resolves against the session's folder, never the process cwd).
odoo_errors	Reads recent ir.logging server errors — the remote equivalent of fetching environment logs.
odoo_session	Mints a passwordless web session (the connect_as_user pattern) stored in .sdd/session.json (chmod 600) for Playwright UI tests. The cookie itself is never returned.
sdd_phase	The phase state machine: init, status (logbook summary, spec directory and specs location), mark_spec_loaded, advance (fail-closed gates: the host is asked for approval natively and the approval_marker/approval_source stay as the documented backstop for hosts with no approval seam), fail (failure ladder + FAILED verdict), succeed (PASSED verdict; refused outside VERIFY/FIX_LOOP, and unless every AC the SPEC declares has a row in test-plan.md reading an explicit pass — an omitted criterion is not a passing one, and the verdict records the fingerprint of the evidence it used so DONE refuses a verdict made stale by an edit), rollback (restore a checkpoint OF THIS SPEC and return to the phase that mode works in — WRITE_CODE, or APPLY_CONFIG for a functional spec), diagnose, waive (record — with native approval — that THIS session may work without a spec: the developer's "leave it to your judgement", kept verbatim in .sdd/waiver.json, reported by status and by the handoff; revoke: true drops it and needs no approval).
sdd_checkpoint	The rollback surface: create (snapshots the workspace, becomes the active checkpoint), list, restore (files, plus — with restore_data=true and confirm_destructive=true — the journaled data mutations: the undo runs under the company context the mutation used, turns read shapes into write values, marks each op so a retry never compensates it twice, refuses a journal from another destination, and reports every field it could not restore; it always REPORTS files created after the checkpoint and deletes them only with remove_created=true), drop, journal.
odoo_docs	Documentation for a module, usable on its own (no spec, phase, checkpoint or instance), so an existing module can simply be documented: check (OCA fragments mapped to Diátaxis, version scheme, changelog, index.html, docstrings, xpath comments, OWL directives → ERROR/WARN with file:line), plan, scaffold (create-only skeletons, never overwrites) and report (persists docs-report.md; APPROVED only when nothing is still a scaffold). The changelog entry is mandatory for any change to a released module.
odoo_security_scan	Local static security review (no instance needed): raw SQL by concatenation, eval/exec/pickle, hardcoded secrets, unjustified sudo(), auth="none", disabled CSRF, QWeb t-raw. Findings carry file:line + a fix hint; any ERROR blocks DONE.
sdd_handoff	Writes specs/<id>/handoff.md (final phase, verdict, decisions, blockers, checkpoints, the COMPLETE per-spec data journal, effective config, next steps) when the run closes.
odoo_config	Reads or updates the persistent configuration and answers "which project am I in?": the resolved root, its provenance (session cwd / configured / process cwd), the specs base, the effective spec directory and the config file in use.
odoo_import	Preparation of a CSV/XLS/XLSX import through Odoo's OWN importer (base_import), never through a parser of this plugin: prepare uploads the authorised file with the web session and its own approval, preview reports what Odoo reads (sheets, headers, a bounded sample, the importable fields), map records a decision per column, plan turns it into an apply batch — and odoo_functional approves and executes it like any other, so this tool never applies an import on its own. A JSONP answer is parsed as data (never executed), the session cookie never leaves the plugin, and a version outside the verified families is refused with what to investigate.
odoo_functional	The batch executor of the functional path: plan (validate and store a batch fail-closed), approve (native human approval bound to the spec, design, plan and batch hashes), apply (execute it one operation at a time, persisting each state before and after the call, and record it as applied only after reading back the state the operation declared — a call that answers but leaves the records untouched is a failure, not a success), inspect (read-only discovery under its own scope), status, reconcile (decide an outcome that came back as unknown), verify (evidence per acceptance criterion) and compensate (build the undo batch from the journal). The declared environment gates the run and production additionally needs a declared backup; while a batch runs, every other mutation path is denied.

---

🎛️ Delegation mode

The pipeline starts by asking how much of it to delegate — recorded once per project with odoo_setup mode=autonomy decision=...:

Mode	Who answers the gates	How it ends
Supervised (default)	you, for each gated phase	you approve, or the run parks
Autonomous	a human-proxy agent (resources/roles/human-proxy.md) that emits only a fail-closed line-start APPROVED or NEEDS_REVISION	create_goal runs unattended rounds until DONE or BLOCKED

[!TIP] In autonomous mode the brakes stay armed: stop.md, the iteration ceiling and the diagnosis ladder all remain, and BLOCKED is the only way the run pages a human. Connection grants are not covered by the switch — a human still authorizes the instance once.

---

🧠 Context engineering layers

Layer	Component
identity	resources/roles/*.md — architect, developer, qa, consultant, human-proxy, security-reviewer, documentation roles, each with its limits. Both bundled skills declare resources/ as their resourceBase, so every roles/… and references/… path resolves from the base the host hands the model
odoo_connection	odoo-client.ts — JSON-RPC auth, execute_kw, session minting
executors	odoo_module, odoo_execute, odoo_validate, odoo_errors
schemas	staged templates with required sections; transition() rejects a phase whose deliverable lacks them
knowledge	version-pinned Odoo pattern skills (delegated, verified by the skill)
skills	skills/*/SKILL.md — the 5-phase development flow and the functional flow, auto-registered with the host on apply(). The body is the ROUTE (phases, owners, gates, exits); the per-phase WORK lives in resources/roles/ and resources/references/, loaded on demand. Measured budgets keep the selected load from creeping back
logbook	kb.json — decisions, discarded options, blockers; read before proposing
audit	.sdd/audit.jsonl — sanitized append-only tool-activity log, written by a global tools/result listener (not just the Odoo tools)
rollback	.sdd/checkpoints/<id>/ — manifest + file snapshot + data journal, restorable per spec
security	odoo_security_scan rules + the security-reviewer role + the mandatory security interview in CLARIFY
test	tests/smoke.mjs — instance-free invariant suite (state machine, security, policy guard, RPC shapes, root/specs layout, real-Cordis host contract) + tests/client.mjs — browser bundle contract and settings-panel render

---

🛡️ Safety, rollback and traceability

The pipeline assumes the agent will eventually be wrong, so every mutation path has a way back and a way to prove what happened.

• Credentials are not consent. Before any tool opens a socket towards the instance, a HUMAN must have approved that exact target. odoo_setup mode=authorize asks through the host's native approval seam and only the allowed-once outcome stores a receipt in .sdd/grants.json (0600, gitignored). The receipt is bound to a fingerprint of url + db + username, so changing any of them invalidates it; mode=revoke drops it. Without a live receipt, no client is handed out at all, so a configured .env cannot be used silently. In AUTONOMOUS mode there are no answerers, so the run reports NOT AUTHORIZED and parks — which is the point.
• The model cannot relax its own policy. Changing the allowlist or the policy guards (odoo_config mode=set) and switching delegation mode (odoo_setup mode=autonomy) each require a native approval.
• No change without a spec — or your explicit waiver. Whatever the request ("now also change X" in the same chat), a change needs a spec in a writing phase (WRITE_CODE, VERIFY, FIX_LOOP, APPLY_CONFIG) or a waiver you approved for THAT session. The gate covers both surfaces: instance mutations (odoo_execute, odoo_module, odoo_import prepare) and source edits through the host's write/edit tools. Writing the spec documents themselves (specs/, .sdd/) is never blocked — otherwise the way out would be blocked too. A small change is a small spec: mode=bug, one acceptance criterion, no design interview. If you would rather not specify it, sdd_phase operation=waive detail="..." records your words, needs your approval, and covers this session only: the next chat starts under the policy again, and every change made under it still lands in the KB as a decision. requireSpecForChanges: false is the human off-switch. Honest hole: the guard sees host tool calls, so a change made through bash (a heredoc, sed -i) is not gated — the pipeline is the path, not a jail.
• Checkpoint before mutating. With requireCheckpointBeforeMutation on (default), instance mutations are denied until sdd_checkpoint create has snapshotted the active spec — and denied outright before WRITE_CODE. The rule covers odoo_execute (CRUD and business actions), odoo_module install|upgrade, odoo_import use=prepare and odoo_functional operation=apply, which used to be missing from that classification. Snapshots skip symlinks (lstat) and never copy .env or key material.
• Fail-closed guard. An internal guard failure denies with a visible reason instead of allowing the call through. The guard is also a MOUNT requirement while either policy is armed: a host that exposes no tools.guard (or whose guard cannot be installed) makes the plugin refuse to mount with the reason and the way out, instead of staying up and looking protected.
• The canonical phase decides. Authorization reads the phase from specs/<id>/state.json; the pointer only says WHICH spec and checkpoint the session works on. A stale pointer can no longer authorize a change for a spec that has already gone BLOCKED.
• The pointer belongs to the session. It lives in .sdd/active/<sessionId>.json, so two chats open on one project no longer overwrite each other and neither can authorize its changes against the other's spec — the failure this scoping exists for. .sdd/active.json remains only as the project's last spec: a new session adopts it as a hint when it is fresh (< 12 h) and names a spec that still exists, and otherwise starts with no spec at all. Checkpoint snapshots stay shared (they are the project's), while which checkpoint is your rollback target is per session; dropping one clears the reference in every pointer that held it. Set adoptProjectPointerHint: false to remove the hint entirely: every session then starts with no spec until it declares one (sdd_phase status spec_id=…), which is the strictest reading of "one session, one spec".
• File rollback. sdd_checkpoint restore puts the snapshotted files back byte-for-byte; sdd_phase rollback returns the spec to the phase its MODE works in — WRITE_CODE, or APPLY_CONFIG for a functional spec — with the failure recorded, so the loop restarts from a known state. It refuses a checkpoint that belongs to another spec. A checkpoint snapshots the project tree, so with the central specs layout the spec documents (which live outside the project) are deliberately not part of it: the spec is the immutable source of truth, not code to roll back.
• Data rollback (best effort, and honest about it). Every create/write/unlink through odoo_execute records its pre-image in the checkpoint journal, stamped with the database and the destination (url+db+user) it was applied to; restore restore_data=true confirm_destructive=true replays it in reverse and refuses a journal from another destination. The replay runs under the company context the mutation used, converts read shapes into write values (many2one, x2many), marks each operation as it is compensated so a retry never repeats one, and reports the fields it could not restore (binary content, read-only or non-stored fields). Re-created records get NEW ids — the report says so. This covers data written through the plugin — not side effects of a module install/upgrade, which are not reverted at database level.
• Restore reports drift. restore always lists the files created after the checkpoint, so nothing is silently left behind; remove_created=true deletes them (inside the snapshotted roots only) to match the snapshot exactly.
• Documentation is a gate, not a footnote. ARCHITECTURE records the decision in ## Documentation, WRITE_CODE produces the OCA fragments + the Apps index.html + the mandatory changelog entry, and DONE is gated by documentationPolicy (required by default; optional and off available). What the plugin cannot do, it says so: gen-odoo-readme, towncrier, Ruff and pylint need a shell, so the fragments are the source of truth and compiling README.rst stays your step.
• Lifecycle: the plugin owns its state and can give it back. odoo_setup mode=purge prints a plan (what it owns and what it deliberately keeps) and deletes only after confirm_destructive=true plus native human approval. It never touches .env (your credentials), stop.md (your brake) or specs/ (your documents).
• Durable state. Pipeline state, KB, verdicts, grants and the journal are written with an atomic replace, and a corrupt file is quarantined next to the original instead of being overwritten: sdd_phase status reports the recovery.
• Traceability. .sdd/audit.jsonl records every tool call with outcome (ok / error / denied), duration and phase; sdd_phase status prints the logbook; sdd_handoff freezes the whole run into handoff.md.
• Emergency brakes. stop.md (at .sdd/stop.md or specs/<active>/stop.md) halts every tool; iteration ceilings and the diagnosis ladder route to BLOCKED instead of looping forever.

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🔐 Security & network posture

• No phone-home. The plugin's ONLY outbound network calls go to the instance URL you put in .env. No telemetry, no update checks, no third-party endpoints.
• Transport guard (fail-closed). http:// is accepted only for loopback hosts (localhost, 127.x, ::1, *.localhost); anything else must be https://, otherwise credential loading is refused — plain http to a remote host would ship the API key in clear text.
• Secret containment. The secret is read once by credentials.ts and only injected into RPC parameters. Every tool output passes through two-layer redaction (known secret + generic password= / Bearer / api_key= / session_id shapes) and home-path masking (/home/user/… → ~/…) before being shown to the model or persisted to the KB.
• Session cookies never reach the model. odoo_session writes the cookie to .sdd/session.json (chmod 600) and returns only the path.
• No install scripts beyond the build. The only lifecycle scripts are prepare/prepack, which compile src/ into the shipped lib/ and do nothing else — no network, no postinstall, no shell. The two have opposite failure policies on purpose: prepare (which runs on an install) never fails one — without the devDependencies or the optional host peers it says what it could not check and emits without type checking so the plugin still loads — while prepack (which runs on a publish) refuses to package a build it could not typecheck. prepack is also what guarantees a published tarball is never missing the entry point its main promises (that failure was real: a clean clone packed 39 files and zero of them under lib/; so was its sequel, a prepare that typechecked during npm install and failed every CI job before the step that installs those peers could run).
• Host requirement declared twice, following dsh-market discovery conventions: engines.dsh and lockstep optional peer ranges on @deepseek-ai/{cordis,dsh-tools,schemastery}. On a host without the tools service the plugin refuses to mount with an explicit error instead of booting broken.

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🖥️ Platform support

The plugin runs wherever DSH does and claims Linux, macOS and Windows — a claim the CI matrix tests rather than asserts (ubuntu-latest and windows-latest, on Node 20 and 22).

Concern	Behaviour
Paths	module_dir and an explicit root accept POSIX (/opt/odoo) and Windows (C:\odoo, UNC) spellings; an absolute path is never concatenated under the project root.
.env permissions	Owner-only (0600) is requested and re-checked after chmod: on a filesystem that cannot express mode bits (Windows, FAT/exFAT, some mounts) the plugin says "owner-only mode requested" and adds a note instead of pretending the file is private. On a real POSIX filesystem, a loose mode that cannot be tightened is still refused.
Atomic writes	State files are written to a sibling temp file and renamed into place, retrying EPERM/EACCES/EBUSY with a bounded backoff — the case where Windows refuses the rename because an editor, indexer or antivirus holds an open handle.
Project root	Resolved per call from the session's folder; the process cwd is only a last resort and is reported as LAST RESORT.
Symlinks	A checkpoint never follows a symlink out of the tree; the test suite skips its symlink assertions where the OS or the user privileges forbid creating one — and says so instead of passing silently.

📁 Where specs live

The project root is the folder open in the current session, so it is not a plugin-wide setting. Spec documents follow it:

Layout	Path	Pick it when
project (default)	<projectRoot>/<specsDir>/<specId>	specs should travel with the code
central	<specsRoot>/<projectSlug>/<specId>	you keep many module repos and want one searchable place

In the central layout each project gets its own subfolder with a .dsh-project-root marker, plus a hash suffix if two projects share a directory name — a foreign folder is never adopted. .sdd/ always stays with the project.

<projectRoot>/
├── .sdd/                       # plugin-owned, gitignored
│   ├── .env                    # credentials, single-target layout (chmod 600)
│   ├── instances/<name>.env    # one file per Odoo target (chmod 600)
│   ├── instances/active.json   # which target is in use
│   ├── config.json             # project configuration
│   ├── grants.json             # human authorization receipts
│   ├── session.json            # Playwright cookie
│   ├── audit.jsonl             # every tool call, sanitized
│   ├── setup-state.json        # onboarding + delegation decision
│   ├── active/<sessionId>.json  # THIS session's pointer (spec, phase, checkpoint)
│   ├── active.json             # the project's last spec (a hint for new sessions)
│   └── checkpoints/<id>/       # manifest + file snapshot + data journal
└── specs/<NNN>-<slug>/         # or the central folder

[!TIP] With several projects open, read the Project root: … [provenance] line that every tool result carries, or ask odoo_config mode=read — it returns the resolved root, its provenance and the effective spec directory.

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⚙️ Configuration

Open Settings → Odoo SDD in the Web UI. Everything is editable there, plus a few copy-paste presets where you need them.

Host requirement: the Settings panel needs dsh >= 0.2.0-rc.1. That host removed the settingsScope service this panel used to bind to, and it now renders the form from the plugin's own Config schema (entry odoo-sdd). On an older host the section is absent and the plugin says so in the console; the tools and the pipeline keep working, and odoo_config mode=read|set edits the same values from the conversation.

# ~/.dsh/profiles/<profile>/cordis.patch.yml (optional: same fields, as a patch)
- insert:
    - id: odoo-sdd
      config:
        specsMode: project      # project | central
        specsRoot: ''           # absolute folder when specsMode=central
        specsDir: specs         # folder inside the project when specsMode=project
        executeAllowlist: []    # models odoo_execute may create/write/unlink
        methodAllowlist: []     # "model.method" pairs a functional batch may call (any model)
                                # the ad-hoc RPC needs no list: any public method + confirm_destructive
        communityRepoUrl: https://github.com/odoo/odoo
        enterpriseRepoUrl: https://github.com/odoo/enterprise
        autonomy: supervised    # supervised | autonomous
        licensed: community     # community | enterprise (OCA is always searched)
        requireCheckpointBeforeMutation: true
        requireSpecForChanges: true     # every change needs a spec in a writing phase (or a waiver)
        securityReviewRequired: true
        securityInterviewRequired: true
        auditAllTools: true
        maxCheckpoints: 5
        documentationPolicy: required   # required | optional | off
        documentationLanguage: ''       # empty = English unless the project says otherwise

[!IMPORTANT] There are two configuration stores, and the more specific one wins: Settings (user-wide, ~/.dsh/settings.yaml) and the project's .sdd/config.json (written by odoo_config mode=set, per project). If a key looks ignored after you change it in the panel, the project file is pinning it — odoo_config mode=read reports the effective values.

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🤖 Model experience

The agent sees 15 tools with self-contained descriptions. Typical flow: sdd_phase init → security interview + odoo_connect → gated phases with APPROVED → sdd_checkpoint create → code → odoo_security_scan → odoo_module install → on traceback, odoo_errors + sdd_phase fail (which may force a diagnosis) → fix (or sdd_phase rollback) → re-verify → sdd_phase succeed → sdd_handoff → DONE. Tool responses are actionable text: server tracebacks, gate rejection reasons and remediation instructions.

The workflow skill is registered at mount time, so its name and description appear in every session's skill catalog automatically. The full instructions load when the model selects it (the catalog is summaries only) or when you type /odoo-sdd-workflow.

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⚠️ Known limitations and deferred work

• Remote tests — without shell access to the instance there is no way to run --test-enable; the second verification layer is RPC/UI testing. Pending: an optional odoo_run_tests tool if you expose a test runner.
• Data rollback is best effort — the tests write to the connected database and there is no ephemeral cloning (by design: you provision and own the target). sdd_checkpoint reverses data written through odoo_execute, but a module install/upgrade is not reverted at database level. Use a disposable database.
• Static security scan scope — odoo_security_scan is rule-based over source text (no AST, no taint tracking), so it catches the common Odoo mistakes, not everything; it complements a human review, never replaces it.
• The change policy covers tool calls, not the shell — write/edit and the Odoo tools are gated; a file written through bash (heredoc, sed -i) is not, because the host exposes no after-the-fact inspection of what a shell command wrote. The policy makes the pipeline the path of least resistance and the exception visible; it is not a sandbox.
• Multi-instance — one target per project (.env). Pending: named instance profiles (dev, `staging

…