great_cto: what's new — three features and the move to Opus 4.8

#ai #opensource #claude #devtools

While you were sleeping (or heroically fixing prod), great_cto — the engineering-process engine for solo founders and teams up to 50 people — picked up some new tricks. No fluff: three features that actually change your daily grind, plus a model upgrade that didn't require re-mortgaging the apartment.

1. Discovery pipeline: think before you code

A timeless genre: write first, find out what you should have written later. Until now the pipeline started with the architect, and everything "before" — problem research, prioritization, the PRD — lived in your head, your notes, and three browser tabs you were too scared to close. That gap is now filled by two commands:

/discover — a full product-discovery cycle. Builds an Opportunity-Solution Tree (Teresa Torres' framework): desired outcome → opportunities → solutions → experiments. Ranks opportunities by Opportunity Score = Importance × (1 − Satisfaction) and tosses in ≥3 solutions for each. Output lands in docs/discovery/OST-<slug>.md.
/prd — a structured 8-section PRD, from Executive Summary to success criteria. Asks at most 4 clarifying questions (not 40, like that one meticulous stakeholder) and hands you a finished doc in docs/requirements/.

The PM agent also finally learned to prioritize features when there's more than one and they're all "urgent": pick from Opportunity Score / ICE / RICE / MoSCoW. The full new route: /discover → /prd → /architect → /pm → senior-dev.

2. Quota warning at session start

There's a special genre of pain: hitting the rate limit right in the middle of a heavy pipeline, when the result was just around the corner. The new quota-check.mjs hook checks your Claude Code quota at the start of every session and tactfully clears its throat ahead of time:

⚡ 70%+ — prefer the fast-path for big features
🔴 85%+ — fast-path only (skip the ARCH doc)
🛑 95%+ — friend, not today. Don't start the heavy pipeline

As a bonus it shows your burn rate per window (on track, or living large), tracks Sonnet's 7-day sub-quota separately, and watches pay-as-you-go spend. Parallel agents share a single request via a 5-minute cache — no DDoS-ing your own API. API-key users aren't touched at all — it quietly steps aside.

3. digital-health-pack: an overlay for wearable and mental-health products

A new domain overlay (Wave 4) attaches itself the moment your project starts cozying up to wearables and digital health — Apple HealthKit, Google Health Connect, Garmin, Fitbit, Oura, Whoop, biometrics (HRV, SpO2, sleep), mental-health AI, nutrition/supplement recommendations, or physician-in-the-loop (HITL) flows.

What's in the box:

a chain of three reviewers (digital-health-reviewer + ai-clinical-reviewer + healthcare-reviewer);
five human gates: wellness vs SaMD classification, HITL design, wearable API access, supplement safety (drug-interaction check + NIH dose limits), and a crisis-escalation protocol for mental health;
a ready-made threat-model template and EVAL suites — refuse-to-diagnose, supplement safety, and crisis escalation per AFSP Safe Messaging guidelines.

In short: a built-in regulatory checklist (FDA General Wellness vs SaMD, HIPAA, GDPR Art. 9, EU AI Act Annex III) — so your health startup attracts an investor, not a regulator's notice.

Bonus: moving to Claude Opus 4.8

great_cto upgraded its flagship: claude-opus-4-7 → claude-opus-4-8 (Anthropic shipped it on 2026-05-28). The kind of move that needs no boxes and no movers:

Where it works: architect (deep cross-cutting reasoning and ADR generation) plus 41 reviewers/specialists and commands/review.md via advisor-model.
What you gain: better coding at the default effort level for comparable token spend, and a 1M-token context window (yes, even that legacy module fits).
Same price: $5 / $25 per MTok (in/out) — just like 4.7. Accounting can exhale.
Tier aliases untouched: agents on model: sonnet / model: haiku stay as they were — only explicit Opus pins moved.