roboco/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to RoboCo are documented in this file.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

[Unreleased]

Fixed

• The PM-respawn loop breaker now survives an orchestrator restart. The circuit breaker that stops RoboCo from respawning the same PM on the same wedged task forever (_pm_respawn_tracker) lived only in memory, so a deploy/crash/OOM reset a task's strike count to 1 and re-burned the whole threshold — four full agent spawns × container cost — against the still-broken task before the gate fired again. The counter is now write-through-persisted to a new respawn_tracker table (migration 051) on every mutation and restored at startup, validated against live tasks so a stale counter can't resurrect against a fixed one. Best-effort and inert when empty (a DB hiccup degrades to exactly the prior in-memory behaviour); it can only ever suppress a spawn, never manufacture one.

[0.13.0] - 2026-06-26

Added

• Gated release manager — RoboCo prepares its own releases, you approve them. Cutting a release was a manual, error-prone checklist (enumerate changes, derive the semver bump, update the CHANGELOG, bump eight version refs, gate, tag, publish). A default-off background loop now runs a fully deterministic readiness sweep — diff since the last tag, conventional-commit classification, the semver bump, version-reference completeness (the "you forgot to bump file X" guard), CHANGELOG completeness, docs drift, migration single-head, and the CI gate state — and, past a threshold with a green gate, opens ONE release proposal held for the CEO. The proposal is held (never dispatched to an agent); you approve or reject-with-changes in the panel, and only on approval does a fail-closed executor write the bumps + CHANGELOG, run make quality (aborting before any commit on red), commit + push, wait for green CI (aborting before publish on red), then publish the GitHub release. Correctness is code, not agent judgment; the only generative step is the CHANGELOG prose, which you review; it never publishes without you. Default-off (ROBOCO_RELEASE_MANAGER_ENABLED).
• Organizational memory loop — agents stop re-learning what the company already knows. Three parts behind one default-off flag (ROBOCO_ORG_MEMORY_ENABLED). ① At task completion the company distills ONE high-signal lesson (Problem → Approach → Gotcha, ≤120 words) via the local model instead of dumping noisy raw notes, and private journal reflections are kept out of the shared knowledge corpus. ② The keystone: when an agent claims a task, the briefing is auto-injected with the top relevant past lessons and approved playbooks for work like this (role-shaped query, relevance-floored so nothing low-signal is added) — the agent never has to think to ask. ③ A first-class, curated playbook library: delivery agents draft playbooks via a new draft_playbook gateway verb, the Auditor approves / rejects / archives them (a bounded, deliberate expansion of its surface — curation, not agent comms), and approved playbooks are embedded into a new PLAYBOOKS knowledge index and surfaced in a panel review queue. Adds the playbooks table (migration 050). Distillation and retrieval run on the local model only and are best-effort — a failure never blocks a completion or a claim.

Fixed

• Pitch auto-provisioning is now idempotent — a re-approval no longer collides. When a pitch's approval partially failed and its DB writes rolled back while the created GitHub repos survived, re-approving it tried to re-create the repos and re-insert the product → project cell mappings, hitting a duplicate-key crash on (product_id, team) and leaving an orphaned product that could not be cleaned up. Provisioning now reuses an existing Project (by slug) and an existing Product (by slug, refreshing its cell map with delete-before-insert ordering) instead of re-creating them, so a re-approval converges cleanly. First-time provisioning is unchanged.
• The mypy roboco/ tests/ quality gate is green again. A batch of test files carried type errors that turned the gate red (SQLAlchemy <row>.id passed where uuid.UUID was expected, a couple of missing return annotations, an invariant-list argument, and a None-attribute access). Each is now typed correctly so the full gate passes. (The deeper cause — many ORM columns annotated Mapped[UUID] against SQLAlchemy's UUID type rather than uuid.UUID — is noted for a separate, dedicated cleanup.)
• An external-PR review can no longer record a verdict that contradicts its own summary. The inbound-PR reviewer verb (post_pr_review) derived both the recorded verdict and the posted GitHub review event solely from its event argument, which defaults to REQUEST_CHANGES — and, unlike the in-path gate's pr_fail, it never required any findings. So a reviewer that concluded "approve" in the summary but left event at its default filed (and posted to the contributor's PR) a blocking "changes requested" with nothing cited. The verb now enforces a verdict↔findings invariant before any record or post: REQUEST_CHANGES must cite at least one finding (almost always a forgotten event='APPROVE'), and APPROVE may not carry a blocker/major finding — rejected with a clear remediation otherwise.

[0.12.0] - 2026-06-25

Added

• Dependency-update bot — the company keeps its own dependencies current. A default-off, per-project engine that periodically (weekly by default) checks whether a dependency upgrade would change a project's lockfiles and, if so, opens one "update dependencies" task into that project — which flows through the normal dev → QA → PR-review → CEO-merge pipeline and never auto-merges. Detection is read-only: it runs the project's configured dep_update_command (e.g. uv lock --upgrade / pnpm update) in a throwaway clone of a read-only copy and checks whether any lockfile path got dirty — the read clone is never mutated and nothing is committed or pushed. Fail-safe: a missing or failing command opens nothing. Bounded and deduped per repo (one open update task per git URL) with per-cycle and rolling caps. A project participates only when its dep_update_command is set (panel → project settings). Default-off (ROBOCO_DEP_UPDATE_ENABLED). Adds projects.dep_update_command / dep_update_paths (migration 049), the WorkspaceService.dry_upgrade_changes_lockfile probe, DepUpdateEngine, and a dedicated orchestrator loop.

• Multi-repo CI-watch — the company watches every repo it owns, not just its own. Self-heal already watched RoboCo's own CI and opened a fix task when it went red; CI-watch generalizes that to any project the operator opts in. Flip ci_watch_enabled on a project (panel → project settings) and, on each pass, RoboCo checks that project's latest CI conclusion on its default branch; if it's red it opens one fix task into that project (and notifies that project's cell PM) — which flows through the normal dev → QA → PR-review → CEO-merge pipeline and never auto-merges. It reuses the same hardened per-project CI lookup self-heal uses, so a missing signal is treated as "unknown" (never a false green) and one project's GitHub error never aborts the sweep. Bounded and deduped per repo (a monorepo's several cell-projects share one fix task, keyed on the git URL), with per-cycle and rolling open-task caps. Default-off (ROBOCO_CI_WATCH_ENABLED), and the single-repo self-heal loop is untouched. Adds projects.ci_watch_enabled / ci_watch_workflow (migration 048) and the MultiProjectCITelemetrySource + CiWatchEngine + a dedicated orchestrator loop.

• The orchestrator now reclaims dangling Docker images on its own. Every rebuild of an agent image orphans the prior build's layers as an untagged <none> image; across many deploys these pile up (the operator hit ~80). The background sweeper now runs docker image prune for dangling images only — throttled to roughly every six hours — so they don't accumulate. It is deliberately conservative: only dangling images are removed (a tagged image, or one backing a running container, is never dangling), it is best-effort (a failure is logged, never raised), and it can be turned off with ROBOCO_IMAGE_PRUNE_ENABLED=false.

Fixed

• An external PR on a monorepo is no longer reviewed twice. Inbound external/internal PR review de-duplicated per (project_id, pr, head_sha), but several cell-projects can map to one repo (a monorepo) — and the poll already collapses to a single canonical project per repo, so the dedupe and the poll disagreed once a review task was re-pointed to a sibling project: the next poll, checking the canonical project, no longer saw it and opened a second review of the same PR. The dedupe is now scoped to the repo (git_url) rather than a single project, so the same PR on any project sharing the repo is reviewed once; re-review on a new head commit still works, and genuinely different repos that happen to share a PR number are reviewed independently.

• Completing a task whose PR is already merged no longer loops. A merge request against an already-merged PR returns the same 405 from GitHub as a genuine "not mergeable" conflict, so the completion path treated an already-landed PR as a conflict and tried to rebase / close-superseded / escalate it — bouncing the task between blocked and unblocked forever (the case where a prior cycle, a sibling, or the CEO had already merged it). The merge now disambiguates: if the PR reports as merged, the merge is treated as idempotent success and completion proceeds; only a PR that is genuinely unmerged raises the conflict.

• After an orchestrator restart, a still-running agent is no longer double-spawned. The orchestrator's in-memory instance registry is lost on a restart while the agent containers keep running. The stale-claim reaper already had a Docker-liveness fallback for that, but the spawn gate (_is_agent_active) did not — so right after a restart it saw a live agent as inactive and could launch a second container onto the work the forgotten-but-running one was already doing. Startup now re-adopts surviving containers: it probes each known agent slug's container (the same docker inspect the reaper uses) and re-registers a minimal active instance for any that is running, before the dispatcher and reaper loops start. Inert when nothing is running, and best-effort (a probe error just leaves that slot for the reaper's own fallback to cover).

• A resumed agent on a drifted shared clone no longer wedges with BRANCH_MISMATCH. A dev/documenter/QA clone is shared across that agent's tasks; on a respawn/resume it can sit on a sibling task's branch, or a re-provisioned clone can lack the task branch as a local ref (its commits are only on origin). The fresh-claim path git-resets the clone clean, but resume deliberately short-circuits before it — so the agent's next commit hit the branch-mismatch guard, failed, and the task wedged in a blocked respawn loop (e.g. the documenter that could never land its doc commit). The guard now recovers instead of only rejecting: it fetches and checks out the task's branch (recreating a missing local ref from origin) and only raises when it genuinely cannot switch — i.e. uncommitted changes block it. It never discards work (checkout, not reset), so a resumed agent's unpushed commits are preserved.

• An integration branch is no longer deleted out from under in-flight work (the "branch gone from origin" zombification). After a PR merged, the post-merge cleanup deleted its head branch unconditionally — so merging a cell→root PR deleted the cell branch while a sibling leaf PR was still targeting it as its base, and the CEO's root→master merge deleted the feature/main_pm/{root} integration branch. The dependent PRs then had no base, every later git op against the vanished branch failed, and the task zombified (the symptom an earlier fix only made non-fatal). The remote-branch delete chokepoint now first checks whether any open PR still targets the branch as its base — an active integration target — and preserves it if so; it fails safe (on any error it keeps the branch, since cleanup is best-effort but stranding is not). True leaf branches with no open dependents are still cleaned up as before.

• Mypy [unreachable] error in test_pr_gate_records_verdict resolved. A test assigned t.notes_structured = None in the function body, causing mypy to narrow the attribute type to None. Since the test's helper function took the object as Any, mypy did not reset its narrowing after the call, treating assert t.notes_structured is not None as statically always-False and marking the next line as [unreachable], failing the quality gate. Fixed by introducing _TaskWithNoNotes — a helper class that declares notes_structured: dict[str, Any] | None = None in __init__ — so mypy uses the declared union type rather than a narrowed literal. All tests pass with no suppressions. This pattern is documented in the testing standards for future reference.

• Ruff lint errors from autonomous-maintenance PR (#264) resolved. The Feat/autonomous-maintenance merge introduced 4 ruff lint errors that broke the quality gate: (1) unused cast import in roboco/api/routes/project.py (F401), (2) unused cast and UUID imports in roboco/services/self_heal_engine.py (F401), and (3) Sequence import in roboco/services/telemetry/source.py placed at module level instead of in TYPE_CHECKING block (TC003). Root cause: the autonomous-maintenance refactoring orphaned these imports (cast was imported but never called; UUID was in TYPE_CHECKING but not referenced; Sequence was used only in annotations and must be in TYPE_CHECKING when from __future__ import annotations is present for proper runtime safety). Fixed by removing the unused imports and moving Sequence to TYPE_CHECKING. The TC003 pattern is a best practice: all imports used only in type annotations should reside in TYPE_CHECKING to avoid circular imports at runtime and reduce module startup cost. No suppressions added; all quality gates pass (10197 tests, 95.51% coverage).

[0.11.1] - 2026-06-25

Fixed

• A PM no longer respawn-loops on its own coordination root after it is bounced back for revision. The lifecycle spec lets a cell/main PM re-claim a needs_revision coordination root — so a root rejected by pr_fail / qa_fail / ceo_reject can be re-planned and re-delegated via i_will_plan — but the runtime's claim-status map omitted needs_revision for the PM roles. The spec gate allowed the verb while the composed claim() underneath rejected it, returned nothing, and surfaced as a cryptic INVALID_STATE: the PM could neither plan nor idle its own rejected root and respawn-looped (one live run logged ~143 such rejections across 11 PM sessions — the tail of the 2026-06-24/25 firefight). The runtime claim statuses now include needs_revision for the PM roles, and a parity test locks the runtime map to the lifecycle spec so the two can't drift apart again.

• A finished merge no longer respawn-loops the PM when its target branch has been deleted from origin. When an integration (cell/root) branch is removed from origin — e.g. a sibling cell→root merge that strands a late straggler leaf — the post-merge _sync_target_branch ran git fetch origin <branch> and raised "couldn't find remote ref". But pr_merge only reaches that sync after the authoritative GitHub merge has already succeeded, so refreshing the local copy of the now-gone target branch is purely cosmetic — yet the raise surfaced as a retryable SERVICE_ERROR, so complete() re-blocked the task and respawn-looped the PM on an already-landed merge (observed live blocking a cell PM's complete() for 5+ cycles). The post-merge sync is now best-effort (it logs and returns instead of raising); the CEO merge path keeps the strict sync, since its target is the always-present default branch.

• A PM no longer re-delegates already-finished work as an empty phantom subtask. A parent's acceptance-criteria coverage is matched by stable criterion id, but a PM may declare covers_parent_criteria on a child by either the criterion's id or its full text (both happen in practice), and the coverage matcher only counted id matches. So a completed child that had declared its coverage by text was invisible to the roll-up: the criterion read "uncovered", the gate refused to close the parent, and the PM re-delegated the already-merged work as a brand-new empty subtask (zero commits, no PR) that can never close — looping for hours and burning tokens (observed live: a parent's work completed and merged via one child, then re-delegated two hours later as an empty phantom). Every child ref is now normalized to the criterion id (text → id via the parent's own criteria) before counting, so coverage is recognized however it was declared; an unknown ref still matches nothing, exactly as before.

• An ownership failure now reads as an authorization error instead of a fixable tracing gap. A PRECONDITION_OWNERSHIP rejection (a non-owner invoking an owner-only verb) was dispatched as a generic tracing_gap — which looks like a recoverable missing-artifact precondition, so a superseded agent kept retrying the same verb instead of fetching new work. Preconditions now carry a rejection_kind, and PRECONDITION_OWNERSHIP is tagged not_authorized, so an ownership failure surfaces as the clear identity/role boundary it is (and the choreographer and lifecycle spec now agree on the kind across the parity suite). This generalizes, at the spec layer, the same not_authorized steer the reassigned-developer i_am_done / open_pr short-circuit already gives.

• The spawn gate now suppresses respawns for every parked provider, not just Grok. When a provider is parked — a rate-limit 429, a persistent overload, or the Claude session limit — the dispatcher must stop launching new agent containers until it recovers, or it just re-spawns agents every tick straight back into the wall. That guard was Grok-only, so an Anthropic park still let the dispatcher churn. The spawn gate now consults the rate-limit tracker for every provider (failing open if the tracker itself errors), so any provider's park actually quiets dispatch.

• A Claude session-limit hit is now detected from the agent's transcript, so the park actually fires. Parking the workforce on the Claude "5-hour" session limit (added in 0.11.0) read the session-limit 429 markers from the agent container's docker logs — but the Claude SDK server writes its runtime output to a log file inside the container, so those markers never reached docker logs and the detector silently missed them, letting the whole fleet crash-respawn back into the limit. The detector now also reads the tail of the newest durable Claude transcript as a fallback, so a session-limit exit parks the provider and the background probe loop auto-revives the agents when the window resets.

• A failed in-path PR-review gate now actually leaves its verdict on the PR. The gate posts its pass/fail review to the assembled PR so the decision is visible where the PM (or CEO) merges — but it could only resolve the PR's repo from the task's project_id, and a Main-PM coordination root (the only task a root→master PR ever sits on) usually carries just a product_id (the cell→repo map) and no project of its own. So the slug resolved to nothing and the post silently no-op'd: a root→master PR could be failed back to needs_revision with no comment on the PR explaining why. The gate — and the external-PR reviewer's read-only diff fetch — now fall through to the product's repo when the task has no direct project, so the verdict reaches the PR.

• A task's PR-reviewer notes no longer show "passed" after the gate failed it. pr_pass / pr_fail only threaded their notes through the tracing-gate check and posted to GitHub — neither wrote the task's structured pr_review slot. So a task passed once and later failed kept displaying verdict: passed (green card and all) while its real transition was pr_fail → needs_revision. The gate now authors the canonical pr_review note on every decision — pr_pass records passed, pr_fail records failed with the issues — so the panel's PR-Reviewer card always matches the actual outcome (best-effort: a malformed note is skipped, never rolling back the gate decision).

[0.11.0] - 2026-06-24

Added

• MegaTask — describe several tasks in one intake chat and ship them as one sequenced batch. When the CEO wants several pieces of work at once — even across projects that don't share a codebase (e.g. a SaaS app, its open-source core engine, and a framework adapter) — the intake modal now offers a third scope, MegaTask, beside Single cell and Board-led. You pick the repos it spans; the intake agent reads them all and proposes the whole batch in one hand-off (the new propose_batch tool), one draft per task, each carrying its own project plus a collision surface (which files it touches, whether it adds a migration, whether it edits a widely-shared component). A deterministic analyzer (SequencingService) turns those surfaces into conflict-free waves — file-overlap and migration-adding tasks are serialized, a shared-surface edit runs after what it overlaps, independent tasks run in parallel — and the Board reviews the batch once. On confirm RoboCo creates a branchless umbrella task (the Main PM's coordination + board-review + CEO-approve unit) over N root-subtasks, each a real coordination root with its own project, branch, and PR, wired with the analyzer's dependencies so the existing dependency-gate dispatches the waves in order. The umbrella assembles no PR of its own, is exempt from the branch gate, and completes only when every root-subtask is terminal (then it escalates to the CEO). On the Board route the root-subtasks are held until the umbrella is approved, then released. Surfaced as a core capability — no feature flag — branded "MegaTask" across the panel, prompts, and docs; internal names stay technical (batch_id, SequencingService). Adds tasks.batch_id + the three collision-surface columns (migration 046), confirm_live_batch + POST /prompter/live/{session}/confirm-batch, multi-project intake spawn (project_ids), the propose_batch tool on both intake runtimes (Claude SDK driver + grok CLI server), and the panel's MegaTask scope + Review-MegaTask card.

• New Ollama Cloud models in the LLM catalog. Added kimi-k2.7-code:cloud and nemotron-3-ultra:cloud to the Settings model picker. north-mini-code-1.0 is available only as a self-hosted Ollama tag, so it is left out of the cloud catalog and will appear automatically in the self-hosted picker when pulled locally.

Fixed

• A PM that forgot to journal its decision no longer stalls a finished task forever. Every PM decision-point verb (unblock, complete, submit_up / submit_root, escalate_up / escalate_to_ceo) required a separate note(scope='decision') call to be made before the verb — and loaded or weak models reliably forget to chain that prior side-effect, so the verb hit a tracing_gap (journal:decision missing), the agent retried, and a task whose work was actually done sat stranded in a reject → respawn loop (the dominant remaining completion-path blocker in a 24h run; one live case: a corrected PR that could not be merged because the Main PM's unblock kept failing the gate). The verb now auto-records its own rationale as the journal:decision the gate needs, before the gate runs — the same write-then-gate pattern already used for i_am_blocked → write_struggle and for the qa_notes / pr_reviewer_notes sections — so the gate passes off real, persisted reasoning instead of demanding a redundant bookkeeping call. complete / submit_up / submit_root / escalate_* reuse the notes / reason the PM already passes; unblock now takes a required reason (threaded MCP tool → request schema → routes → choreographer); delegate derives the decision from the subtask's title + description. The gate still runs as defense-in-depth, the auto-record is idempotent within the decision window and best-effort (a journal hiccup falls back to the prior reject, never a crash), and the recorded decision is the PM's real words — so accountability is preserved, not bypassed.

• An empty-diff subtask no longer loops a developer on "open a PR". When overlapping decomposition leaves a leaf branch with zero commits relative to its base (its work was actually delivered by the parent or a sibling), open_pr pushed the branch and GitHub refused the PR with a 422 "No commits between …". That was surfaced as a generic invalid_state whose remediation said "retry", so the developer re-issued open_pr over and over (observed 15× on a single task) and never progressed. open_pr now recognizes the empty-diff 422 and returns a terminal hand-off instead: it tells the developer not to retry — the branch has no diff, so the work was delivered by the parent — and to call i_am_blocked so the PM can complete or cancel the redundant leaf.

• A reassigned developer no longer retries i_am_done / open_pr forever. When a task is reassigned out from under a still-running agent (a pool release, reaper unclaim, or escalation redirect), the agent's later i_am_done or open_pr failed the spec's ownership precondition as a tracing_gap (owns_task missing) — which reads like a fixable precondition, so the superseded agent kept retrying the same verb (41 such rejections in one run). Both verbs now short-circuit a non-owner with the same clear not_authorized "this task is no longer yours — call give_me_work()" steer that resume and unclaim already use, so a superseded agent is told plainly to fetch new work or go idle instead of looping.

• A Main PM blocking its own coordination root no longer hands the whole root to the Board (a respawn catch-22). Root cause: the generic escalation chain points main-pm → product-owner, and i_am_blocked / escalate REASSIGNS the task to that chain target. The board-advisory guard that refuses such a hand-off only covered descendant cell tasks (it required parent_task_id), so a top-level Main-PM coordination root slipped through and the entire root was reassigned to the Product Owner and marked blocked. A Board role has no unblock verb at all (only notify / note / triage / i_am_idle) and the unblock gate is assignee-only, so it could neither resolve the blocker nor hand it off — it just spam-notified the CEO while the blocked-task dispatcher respawned it every tick (one live incident burned an estimated 6400+ tool calls on a single root). Fixed at both layers: the escalation / reassign / revival guard now also refuses a Board owner for a main_pm coordination task (root or MegaTask root-subtask) and diverts it to the pool for a role-matched (Main-PM) re-claim — the upstream cure — via a single shared _board_cannot_own predicate; and, as a defense-in-depth backstop, the orchestrator's blocker dispatcher no longer treats a Board role as a blocker resolver (it returns no resolver, so a mis-owned blocked task is skipped rather than respawned onto a role that physically cannot act).

• A racing state change mid-verb no longer crashes a PM into a respawn loop. The gateway's verb runner guards the initial task/agent against None, but its composed atomic actions reassign the working task from each step (i_will_plan runs claim → set_plan → start). When a concurrent agent transitioned the row between the verb's precondition gate and execution — e.g. a racing i_am_blocked moved a coordination root from needs_revision to blocked — claim() found no valid transition and returned None, then the next step dereferenced None.id and crashed with the opaque 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'id', surfaced to the agent as a cryptic "verb runner failed" so the PM respawn-looped on the wedged root. The runner now re-checks after each composed action and fails fast with an actionable INVALID_STATE that tells the agent the row changed under it and to re-fetch and re-issue its verb (the savepoint rolls the partial sequence back).

• A completed task no longer wedges when its branch is missing from a re-provisioned clone. Push-by-name (the fix that decoupled the push from the workspace checkout) still requires the named task branch to exist as a local ref — but a developer's shared clone can be freshly re-provisioned (the per-task workspace-collision recovery re-clones it), leaving the task branch absent locally even though its commits are safely on origin and the clone is parked on a different task's branch. git push origin <branch> then died with the cryptic src refspec <branch> does not match any and the task blocked-looped at i_am_done. The push now recovers a missing local ref from origin/<branch> first (a clean no-op when the work is already on origin); if the branch exists on neither the clone nor origin the commits are genuinely gone from this clone, so it fails loud with a recoverable "unclaim the task and re-claim it to rebuild the branch, then replay your commits" instruction instead of the raw refspec error.

• The orchestrator's own recovery actions now actually run. Its background dispatcher made internal HTTP calls to its own API without an agent identity, so every self-PATCH to a task — auto-blocking a task with missing prerequisites, auto-resuming a PM's paused parent, auto-recovering a stale-blocked parent, annotating an SLA breach — was rejected with 401 Missing X-Agent-ID and silently dropped. The visible effect was paused/blocked parent tasks staying wedged and their dependent work stranded (with the dispatcher logging a "respawning assignee" loop). Header propagation was inconsistent across the orchestrator's separate HTTP-client call-sites — only the main dispatch loop sent the identity. The system identity is now hoisted into one shared constant and applied to every API-facing dispatcher client (the external provider-recovery probe is intentionally excluded); the system role holds the permission required for the audited status-override path those routes use.

• A developer's completed work no longer silently fails to reach GitHub ("No commits between"). A developer's single git clone is shared across all of their tasks, so by the time a task's PR is opened the clone has usually moved on to a later task's branch. The push at the QA-submission / open_pr boundary, and the PR's head branch, were both taken from the clone's current checkout — so the push was rejected (the workspace was parked on another task's branch) and the locally-committed work never reached origin, leaving the task branch empty and open_pr failing with GitHub's "No commits between" 422. The work was on disk and correct, just never pushed. Both the push and the PR head now operate on the task's recorded branch by name, independent of the checkout (push(branch=…) targets the named ref; the PR head is the task's branch_name). Work committed on any of a shared clone's task branches now pushes and opens its PR correctly.

• Hitting the Claude session limit now parks the workforce instead of crash-looping it. When the org's Claude usage ("5-hour") limit is reached, each agent container exits with a 429 rejection; the orchestrator was treating that like any crash and immediately respawning the agent straight back into the limit, over and over, across the whole fleet. It already parks the provider on a persistent server overload (529/500/503) and revives the parked work once it recovers — but that detection only matched the overload signatures, not the session-limit 429. The same park-and-resume break now also recognizes the session limit: the provider is parked, dispatch goes quiet, and the background probe loop brings the agents back automatically when the window resets — no churn, no wasted respawns.

• A failed PR review no longer looks green. On a task's detail page, the "PR Reviewer Notes" card was painted a fixed teal/green background regardless of the review verdict, so a Failed review — red badge and all — sat inside a green card and could read as passing at a glance. The card background now mirrors the verdict the way the QA Notes card already does: red on a failed review, green on approved/passed, amber on changes-requested, and neutral before a verdict is in.

• The CEO and other human roles no longer get spammed with agent "learnings." Whenever an agent recorded a learning, RoboCo broadcast it as a knowledge-share notification — and the recipient query swept in the human roles too (the CEO, plus the human-driven prompter and secretary). Agent knowledge-sharing is a signal for agents; in a human's inbox it is just noise. Those roles are now excluded from learning broadcasts.

• A gateway verb on a vanished task/agent fails cleanly instead of crashing cryptically. The verb runner's atomic steps dereference task.id / agent.id with no guard, so a verb invoked when the task or agent could not be resolved (e.g. a task forced into an unexpected state out-of-band) crashed with an opaque 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'id'. The runner now fails fast with an actionable INVALID_STATE error that tells the agent to re-fetch and re-issue its claim verb.

• An agent could be permanently wedged in a respawn loop by duplicate work sessions on one task. A task is owned by one agent at a time, so it must have at most one active git work session — but nothing enforced that: when a task was re-claimed by a different agent (after a pool release, reaper unclaim, or escalation redirect) the prior holder's active session was left open. WorkSessionService.get_active_for_task then ran a one-row query across the duplicates and raised MultipleResultsFound; the caught failure surfaced as the cryptic 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'id' that crashed the claim/plan/start flow, so the task could never advance — the orchestrator re-spawned its PM every ~30s forever and the task's dependents stayed blocked. (This was the real root cause behind the verb-runner INVALID_STATE guard above, which only made the crash legible.) Fixed at three layers: the active-session lookups now return the most-recent session instead of raising; claiming a task supersedes any other agent's stale active session (the single-active-per-task invariant); and a partial unique index — migration 047, which first de-duplicates existing rows, keeping the most recent — enforces it at the database level so it can never recur.

• A dev claiming a new task no longer gets stuck on BRANCH_MISMATCH. Each developer has one persistent clone shared across all their tasks, so a finished or abandoned prior task could leave the clone dirty and sitting on a sibling task's branch. The claim's git work (creating/checking out the new task's branch) runs as a side-effect after the claim's DB transition commits — so when the checkout failed on that dirty tree, the task was already marked assigned while the workspace stayed on the wrong branch, and the dev's next commit was rejected with BRANCH_MISMATCH (stalling, then blocking, the task). The claim now does a git reset --hard to clean the tree before the checkouts. It runs only on a fresh claim (resume short-circuits earlier), so the discarded changes are abandoned cruft from a finished task — never committed work, and never the gitignored .venv.

• The note tool no longer times out under load. Writing a journal entry / note synchronously waited on RAG indexing, which embeds via Ollama — and Ollama is CPU-bound, so under concurrent load that embed slowed enough to time the note gateway tool out entirely (despite a "non-blocking" comment on the code). The entry is already persisted before indexing, so indexing is pure best-effort enrichment: it now runs fire-and-forget on the event loop, and the note/journal write returns immediately.

• A feature flag stopped showing its raw internal key. In Settings → Feature Flags, the "Gateway-health recovery" toggle displayed its raw key gateway_health_enabled as its description (the only flag missing a human blurb). Added the description, and changed the fallback so a future flag without one renders nothing rather than leaking a snake_case key.

• A missing local parent branch no longer blocks every leaf PR merge. When a cell PM completes a leaf task, _sync_target_branch checked out the parent/cell branch with a bare git checkout <branch> and no fallback — but the agent's shared clone often only has the leaf's own task branch locally, while the parent branch exists only on origin. That produced a "git workspace state inconsistent" SERVICE_ERROR that cycled the task back to blocked each time the PM retried. The merge path now fetches the target branch from origin and creates a tracking branch when the local ref is missing, then pulls and returns the merge commit the same as before.

[0.10.0] - 2026-06-23

Added

• Delivery observability dashboards — cycle-time, bottlenecks, rework rate, and per-agent/per-cell scorecards. A new "Delivery" tab on the Metrics page surfaces how work flows, built on data RoboCo already captures: per-stage cycle time reconstructed from the audit_log transition journey, a bottleneck view (which lifecycle stage holds the most cumulative time + how many tasks are parked there now), a rework view (how often work bounces to needs_revision, by team and by agent, with the rejection attributed to the QA / PR-reviewer who made it, plus the rework's token cost), and fused per-agent / per-cell scorecards. Backed by new read-only MetricsService methods and /dashboard/metrics/{cycle-time,bottlenecks,rework,scorecard} endpoints. To make rework correct and O(1), each task now carries a revision_count incremented at the single transition chokepoint (migration 045, with a composite audit_log(target_id, event_type, timestamp) index for the reconstruction queries), and QA/PR-review bounces emit rejector-attributed task.qa_fail / task.pr_fail audit events. No feature flag — it reads the always-on metrics surface.
• Gateway-health recovery — a broken-but-alive agent is recovered instead of protected forever. The verb-driven heartbeat cannot distinguish a healthy agent quiet during a long edit/test cycle from one whose MCP gateway is broken (e.g. a corrupted /app/.venv so every gateway tool import raises) while its container stays up — and the reaper's live-skip would shield that broken agent indefinitely. The reaper now probes the gateway out-of-band (docker exec: does the gateway venv import its deps?) and, once it has been broken longer than ROBOCO_GATEWAY_HEALTH_GRACE_SECONDS (so a transient probe miss is tolerated), kills + evicts the container so it falls through to release + respawn; a healthy or inconclusive probe spares it. Gated by ROBOCO_GATEWAY_HEALTH_ENABLED (default-on reliability fix, in the panel Feature Flags). Builds on the shipped bash-guard /app block and reaper Docker-liveness fallback — together the third leg the live incident exposed.
• Edit a task's sequence from the task details page. A task's sequence (its order within siblings — lower runs first) was display-only with no way to change it from the UI. The details page's Dependencies tab now carries an inline sequence editor alongside the parent / dependency editors, and PATCH /tasks/{id} accepts a sequence field (owner or privileged role), so an operator can re-order sibling work directly.

Fixed

• Metrics "hours" fields serialized as JSON strings, crashing the panel. EXTRACT(epoch …) returns numeric on PostgreSQL 14+, which asyncpg surfaces as a Decimal — and a Decimal serializes to a quoted JSON string. Every SQL-averaged hours field — avg_cycle_hours on the new Delivery scorecards, plus the pre-existing avg_completion_hours / avg_blocked_hours / longest_blocked_hours — was therefore a string, so the panel's value.toFixed(…) threw toFixed is not a function and blanked the tab. A single _as_hours coercion now rounds each to a real float, so every hours field is a JSON number. (Token/cost fields were already float()-cast and unaffected.)
• The Main PM could not advance past its first coordination task — the developer single-task concurrency guards were deadlocking the coordinator. A PM plans and delegates many root tasks in parallel; the real work then runs in the delegated cells, not in the PM's own hands. But the claim-time guards that correctly keep a developer to one task at a time — already_active (you have another claimed / in-progress task) and paused (you have a paused task, resume it first — which fires after i_am_idle auto-pauses the PM's own umbrella) — were applied to the PM as well, so once it held one root it could never plan a second: it thrashed between its claimed roots and respawned every few minutes, burning tokens for zero progress. These two guards are now skipped for the coordinator PM roles (main_pm / cell_pm): a PM may hold any number of roots in parallel, gated only by a genuine upstream sequence dependency (unmet_dependency), which still parks the task to pending until its dependency reaches a terminal state. As defense-in-depth the paused guard now also excludes the target task itself, so a PM re-entering its own paused umbrella can never self-block.
• Task notes were invisible in the panel — the API response dropped them. The task_to_response serializer (used by the task list and detail endpoints the panel reads) set dev_notes / qa_notes / quick_context but omitted pr_reviewer_notes, doc_notes, and notes_structured, and TaskResponse didn't even declare notes_structured — so the PR-reviewer's notes, the documenter's notes, and the structured PR-review verdict were always blank in the UI no matter what the agents wrote to the DB (the structured-content write-path and obligation gates work; the data simply wasn't being serialized). The builder now returns all note sections plus the structured source of truth. (dev_notes/qa_notes on an in-flight task are still legitimately empty until the developer submits / QA reviews.)

[0.9.0] - 2026-06-23

Added

• Architectural Conventions Standard — a per-project, repo-canonical architecture map that gates where code may live. Beyond the make-style checks (syntax, types, tests), each project can carry a .roboco/conventions.yml declaring which definition kinds belong in which modules, a toggleable rule set, custom regex rules, and waivers — so an agent can no longer land a Pydantic model inside a router or a lint suppression (a misplaced helper — any top-level function — warns rather than blocks). A tree-sitter validator CLI (Python + TypeScript) classifies every changed definition and emits findings; a block-level finding refuses a developer's i_am_done and the in-path PR gate's pr_pass with the offending file:line and a fix hint, and findings surface in QA's review evidence. The auto-derived defaults exclude test and documentation trees, count an explicit db.commit() in a route as legitimate (not a fat-route violation), and exempt a small allowlist of structurally-unavoidable framework suppressions (ruff TC001–TC003, pydantic prop-decorator). The committed file and repo scan are read from a dedicated project-level read clone the service ensures on demand — so the standard resolves even for a project created before it existed, with no manual workspace configuration. The file is auto-scaffolded on first clone, editable from a per-project Conventions tab in the panel, and a false positive is cleared by a waiver committed in the branch and reviewed in the PR. Gated by ROBOCO_CONVENTIONS_ENABLED (default off) and fully inert when off.
• Agent runtime toolchain matching — agents build each target project under the Python that project actually requires. The agent image bakes one interpreter, but the projects RoboCo builds don't all share it, so a self-gate could pass against the wrong runtime. The workspace now resolves each target's Python from its requires-python / .python-version, provisions the clone with uv sync --extra dev --python <version> (fetching the interpreter on demand), and records a .git/.roboco-toolchain marker. A guard refuses a developer's i_am_done, QA's pass_review, and the PR gate's pr_pass when the suite cannot be collected under the provisioned interpreter, so "verifying by reading source" can't masquerade as a passing gate. Gated by ROBOCO_TOOLCHAIN_MATCH_ENABLED (default off).
• Provider overload circuit-break — a persistent model-API overload parks the provider instead of crash-retrying into it. A sustained 529/500/503 (the SDK already retries transient ones) now trips the same park-and-probe break as a rate limit: the spawn gate queues further work for that provider and a background loop revives it when the overload lifts, instead of respawning the agent straight back into the failure and burning tokens. Gated by ROBOCO_OVERLOAD_BREAK_ENABLED (default on).
• Structured content standard with obligated note sections. Every agent-authored handoff (developer, QA, documenter, PR-reviewer, auditor, PM resumption) is now a validated structured model persisted as the source of truth, with the legacy text column derived from it through a single chokepoint. An anti-soup guard rejects filler and all-token-noise free-text across the flow and content verbs, structured PR-review findings render a generated GitHub comment, and each role's note section is obligated at its lifecycle transition the way journals already were.
• User-facing documentation site. A MkDocs Material site (source under docs/) is now built and deployed to GitHub Pages, publishing the organizational blueprint, role descriptions, task lifecycle, and how-to guides at the project's github.io site; the agent-facing RAG corpus under docs/rag/ stays excluded from the published site. Documenter output is also committed into the project repository (not only the RAG knowledge store) so it ships through the open PR.

Changed

• RoboCo adopts its own architectural standard. The repo now ships a canonical .roboco/conventions.yml, and the inline request/response models that lived in the system and *_live route modules were relocated to roboco/api/schemas/ so the codebase passes its own placement gate (no_models_in_routes / modular_cohesion are now clean and enforced at block).
• RoboCo's own requires-python floor is raised to >=3.13. The codebase imports tomllib (3.11+) and runs on 3.13; the previous >=3.10 floor made the toolchain resolver provision the self-hosted build at 3.10, where the suite cannot even be collected. Agent gate containers now also receive the test-database connection, so an agent's make quality runs the real, DB-backed suite instead of a coverage-collapsing unit-only subset.

Fixed

• Documentation now actually lands in the project repo. A documenter's output reached a host-mounted, RAG-indexed knowledge store and (more recently) was committed onto the task branch — but in the documenter's own workspace clone, and nothing ever pushed that commit, so the PM merged the already-open PR without the docs and the deliverable vanished on merge. The documenter's i_documented now pushes the task branch before handing off (mirroring the developer's pre-QA push), so the doc commit rides the open PR into the repository; a push failure holds the task in awaiting_documentation for a retry instead of silently dropping the docs.
• The conventions standard now resolves for projects created before it existed. It previously read the committed .roboco/conventions.yml and the repo scan from project.workspace_path — a field only a manual API call ever set — so an older project (or one whose workspace was cleared) showed an empty "missing" map no matter what was pushed. The service now ensures a dedicated, default-branch read clone on demand and reads from it, persisting the resolved path + HEAD (the backfill). The panel tab, the spawn-time ambient block, and the per-task constraints all resolve the committed standard with no manual setup.
• The conventions ambient prompt block no longer truncates mid-line. It now lists only modules that actually constrain a kind, and when the list would exceed its budget it trims at a line boundary with a +N more pointer instead of cutting a module in half.
• The conventions read clone now stays current on a private repo. Its refresh reused the orchestrator's token-less best-effort fetch, but the clone's remote URL is credential-stripped — so on a private repo the refresh fetch failed silently and the clone stayed frozen at clone-time, never seeing commits merged afterwards (the panel showed "auto-derived defaults" even after the standard was merged to the default branch). The refresh now performs a token-authenticated fetch + hard-reset, mirroring the clone.
• Self-heal fix tasks dispatch autonomously instead of being stranded. A self-heal task was opened confirmed_by_human=false and held out of dispatch until an "Approve & Start" — but that button only renders for board-reviewed Intake tasks, never for a self-heal task (team=main_pm, no board review), so there was no way to start it and it sat in pending forever. Self-heal now opens the fix task confirmed + assigned to the Main PM, so the dispatcher picks it up immediately. The fix still ships through the normal gates (dev → QA → PR review → the CEO's merge); the loop never starts, merges, or deploys.
• Self-heal no longer reads the wrong branch and fails silently. The CI-signal fetch filtered runs by project.default_branch or "main" — the only "main" fallback in the codebase (everywhere else falls back to "master") — so a project whose default branch is master (like RoboCo) with an unset default_branch matched zero runs and the signal silently went dark: no fix task, no notification. The fallback now matches the rest of the codebase, and an armed self-heal that reads no CI signal (no/expired token, wrong branch, or a GitHub error) now logs a loud warning instead of an invisible no-op.
• The toolchain gate no longer passes silently on an unverifiable workspace. A broken interpreter still blocks; an unknown status — the smoke could not confirm the suite is collectable — now emits a warning when the gate proceeds, instead of slipping through unseen.
• The crypto tests are hermetic. The Fernet round-trip tests supply their own key instead of depending on ROBOCO_ENCRYPTION_KEY in the environment, so they pass in any gate container without the production secret being injected.
• ollama-init is best-effort and gates startup on the models being present, so a slow or unreachable model registry can no longer down a fully-cached deployment.
• A PM can recover its own coordination task from needs_revision, and lifecycle-transition notes are kept off the human-facing quick_context / dev_notes columns.
• Panel: a copyable task-id chip with a stable, non-shifting task header, clickable Branch / PR links with a branch-copy button, and clearer agent status badges.
• Panel: the per-project Conventions editor lays out in a responsive two-column grid (Module boundaries | Rules, then Waivers | Custom rules) with Recent violations full-width, inside a wider modal on large viewports — instead of one long single column. Each row's two cards share an equal height, and the Module-boundaries list scrolls internally so it matches the Rules card instead of running long. It collapses to a single column on mobile and is capped so it stays sane up to a 27" display.

[0.8.0] - 2026-06-20

Added

• In-path PR-review gate — every assembled PR is reviewed before the PM merges. A new awaiting_pr_review status sits between the work and the PM merge: the cell PM's submit_up opens the cell→root PR and the Main PM's submit_root opens the root→master PR, and each enters awaiting_pr_review, where a reviewer pr_passes it on to PM review or pr_fails it back for revision — the merge-level reject the PM previously lacked (motivated by a front-end/back-end seam bug that slipped straight through to master). Three new team-scoped cell PR-reviewers (backend, frontend, UX/UI) join the existing main reviewer, taking the company to 25 agents, each with its own first-class image and spawn manifest; leaf developer tasks and branchless coordination roots skip the gate. Ships migration 040 (the awaiting_pr_review enum value) plus the panel surfacing: a legible PR-review status badge, a dedicated "PR Review" kanban tab, and a PR-review column on the management board.
• Panel test gate. The Next.js panel gains a baseline vitest suite over its lib and stores, a pnpm test step enforced in the CI panel job, and a make panel-gate target, so panel changes are quality-gated the way the Python side already is.

Changed

• get_team_metrics reuses the shared ACTIVE_STATUSES constant instead of re-listing the active task statuses inline, keeping the definition in one place.

Fixed

• The self-healing CI signal is now deterministic. The regression watch defaulted to the latest completed run across all of the repo's workflows, so on a multi-workflow repo an unrelated green run — or a green run on an older commit — could mask a red CI run and the loop fired only intermittently. The signal is now scoped to the ci.yml workflow by default, pulls a window of recent completed runs and resolves the conclusion against the branch's current HEAD (a green re-run supersedes the failure; a stale green run can't hide it), and retries transient GitHub errors instead of reading one network blip as all-green.
• Self-heal fix tasks are assigned to the Main PM agent, not just the main_pm team. A team-only task fell to slow unassigned-team routing after the CEO approved it; it is now assigned to the Main PM agent up front so the orchestrator dispatches it straight away once approved. The confirmed-by-human hold that keeps the task inert until CEO approval is unchanged.

Security

• bash-guard denies git verbs hidden in command substitutions — a $(...)- or backtick-wrapped git command could previously slip past the guard.
• Transcript retention matches the encoded workspaces root at a path boundary, so a sibling directory sharing a name prefix is no longer mistaken for the workspaces root during pruning.
• The v1 role guard binds to a verified agent token before trusting a role claim, so the role a request asserts is checked against its signed token rather than taken at face value.
• pydantic-settings upgraded to 2.14.2 to pull in the fix for GHSA-4xgf-cpjx-pc3j.

[0.7.0] - 2026-06-19

Added

• Grok agents on xAI's official grok CLI, on a SuperGrok subscription. A new roboco/llm/providers/ seam (an AgentProvider lifecycle ABC + a ProviderRegistry keyed by ModelProvider) lets the orchestrator drive agent backends other than Claude Code, and the first is Grok — running xAI's official grok CLI authenticated by a SuperGrok subscription rather than a metered API key, so a Grok workforce can't stall mid-task on out-of-credits. It reaches parity with the Claude path by construction: the same MCP gateway + tool-manifest wiring, per-role tool removal and git-operation deny rules, a prompt-injection guard on the task prompt, headless tool auto-approval, and per-agent token/cost capture from the grok session store. It covers both one-shot delivery roles and the interactive Intake (Prompter) and Secretary chats (per-turn grok -p with session resume, streamed turn-by-turn). The change is purely additive — only GROK routes through the registry; Anthropic / Ollama Cloud / self-hosted spawns are untouched — and ships migration 038 (the grok enum) + 039 (the seeded provider row), first-class roboco-agent-grok / -prompter / -secretary images wired into all three compose files and the release workflow, and a Settings provider card.
• SuperGrok token auto-refresh. The grok access token has a fixed ~6h server-set TTL and the CLI cannot refresh it headlessly — on an expired token it hangs forever at an interactive login prompt — so the orchestrator now mints a fresh token from the offline-access refresh token (xAI's OIDC refresh_token grant) before expiry and rewrites the shared auth.json in place, keeping every Grok agent's credential live with no recurring manual grok login. As a backstop the agent entrypoint refuses to start (exit 78) on a missing or expired token instead of hanging.
• Self-healing CI loop (default-off). RoboCo can now watch its own repository's CI and, on a detected regression, open a fix task that is held out of dispatch until the CEO approves it — then dispatch it through the normal delivery flow, so the company repairs its own breakages. It is dormant by default and armed from two Feature-Flags panel toggles; the CI signal is scoped to a single named workflow, and task origination is bounded by rolling and per-cycle caps so it can't flood the backlog.
• Company Scorecard. A company scorecard on the panel's Business Goals tab.

Fixed

• The PR-reviewer is no longer wedge-killed before it can post a review. pr_review_claim now seeds the claim heartbeat like every other claim path; without it a Grok reviewer was treated as a silent (NULL-heartbeat) wedged container and killed before it could call post_pr_review, churning the task back to pending in a respawn loop.
• Grok one-shot runs are observable, and their usage is captured. The entrypoint streams agent activity to the container log live (--output-format streaming-json) instead of buffering it to a file until the run ends, and per-agent token/cost is read from the grok session store's actual cumulative-total field (it was silently reading $0).
• Path-injection hardening of the Grok usage directory. The agent id is validated and reduced to a single safe path component before it is used to build the per-agent usage path, on both the write/mount and finalize-read sides.

[0.6.0] - 2026-06-17

Added

• Inbound PR review — the org reviews, and can take over, pull requests it didn't open. A new read-only pr_reviewer role (a 22nd agent, its own first-class image and spawn manifest, migration 037) discovers inbound PRs, reviews the diff adversarially, and posts a single complete change-request as a real GitHub review on the PR itself — no agent-to-agent chatter. It covers external / fork PRs, gated by a configurable author allowlist, and — behind a second flag — internal org-repo PRs opened outside the agent task-flow (the org's own in-flight integration PRs are skipped, since a live task already owns their branch and they pass QA + PM review). Re-review is driven by the PR's head commit (an unchanged PR is skipped, new commits open a fresh review), and polling is repo-aware so a monorepo is no longer reviewed several times over. External-PR review is enabled by default in the shipped compose (with human-confirm on); internal-PR review is off by default. Both are flippable from the panel.
• CEO decision queue + supersede for reviewed PRs. Completed reviews surface in a PR-review queue in the panel — in-flight reviews are shown too, linking to the PR, so it never goes dark. From there the CEO can dismiss a review, or supersede the PR: the system cuts a roboco-owned branch off the contributor's commits and opens a Main-PM coordination task to finish and harden the work to our standards on that branch, open our own PR, and — once that replacement actually merges — close and link the contributor's PR. We never push to a contributor's fork.
• Feature-flags panel. A Settings → Feature Flags card toggles env-gated subsystems (external / internal PR review, web research, the strategy engine, pitch provisioning, RAG auto-update, transcript pruning) from the panel instead of hand-editing environment variables. A toggle persists in the existing settings store and takes effect on the next backend restart; an unset flag falls back to its environment / config default, and secrets (API keys, tokens) are never surfaced to the client.
• Required-cells decomposition gate. When a coordination task names the cells that must deliver it, the Main PM can no longer go idle having silently dropped one — i_am_idle is rejected until every named cell has a subtask, and the Main-PM prompt now insists on honoring explicitly-named cells rather than quietly dropping them. Inert until the marker is set, so existing flows are unaffected.

Changed

• Run from pre-built registry images. A standalone registry compose runs the full stack — including every per-agent image, now extended to the Secretary and the PR-reviewer — from published images rather than a local build. Both deploy paths, the registry knobs, and measured idle / under-load resource usage are documented.
• Documentation, for humans and agents. The how-to guide is now a structured, multi-chapter walkthrough under docs/how-to/ with a new business-workflow chapter (charter → Cockpit → Secretary, and the research / strategy / PR-review toggles); the published reference docs (README, usage, deployment, CLAUDE) were refreshed against the current code, with a CI guard that keeps documentation prose single-line. Agents also get richer in-context guidance: new RAG role docs for the Prompter, Secretary, and PR-reviewer, the 0.4.0 company layer (goals / research / strategy / provisioning) documented for them, and a refreshed guardrails surface.

Fixed

• The PR-reviewer no longer respawns in a loop. Without a spawn manifest the reviewer had no flow verbs, so it could never claim its review and was respawned over and over (burning tokens); it now ships a role-scoped manifest and reliably claims its work. The supersede close-on-land path was also hardened — the contributor PR is retired only once our replacement PR has actually merged, not merely when the umbrella task completed.
• A CEO-rejected coordination root no longer deadlocks. A product-linked coordination task the CEO sends back to needs-revision is re-dispatched to its owning PM (and the readiness gate now accepts a PM on a coordination root in that state), instead of sitting unowned forever because the developer dispatcher skipped it.
• Panel UI standardization + usability pass. A panel-wide pass plus targeted fixes: the Settings grid layout, the Journals and Kanban scroll regions, the agent-list item, the Projects table, kanban cards whose text overflowed, the PR-review queue's empty state, and the Secretary chat composer buttons.

Internal

• DB-backed and httpx-mocked test coverage for the inbound-PR read and lifecycle paths (ingest / dedup / classify / claim / complete / supersede); a cyclomatic-complexity refactor of the git PR-creation and lifecycle-validation code to clear the xenon gate; and the cell-PM / main-PM role docs corrected to the real delegate signature and cross-linked to each other.

[0.5.0] - 2026-06-16

Added

• Acceptance-criteria & decomposition guardrails. Every task's acceptance criteria now carry stable per-criterion ids, and each decomposed subtask records which parent criteria it is responsible for (covers_parent_criteria). Two gates build on that linkage: a PM can no longer go idle leaving a parent criterion with no subtask responsible for it (the decomposition floor), and a parent can no longer complete / submit up / escalate to the CEO unless every one of its criteria traces to a child that passed QA on it (the roll-up gate). PMs see live coverage in their briefings (parent_ac_coverage, unclaimed_parent_acs) after each delegate. Safe-by-construction: every gate stays inert until a PM starts declaring coverage, so existing decompositions are never blocked. (Migration 036.)
• Per-dev sequenced code queues. A cell PM now delegates each developer its full queue of code subtasks up front instead of one task at a time. Both cell developers build in parallel, and each works its own queue one task at a time, in order — enforced by a per-lane dispatch barrier, with leaf PRs still merged in sequence into the shared cell branch. The old "two code subtasks per parent" ceiling is removed; the 12-subtask hard cap and a same-title duplicate guard remain.
• Unified Business page. The Company Goals, Secretary, and Pitches pages are consolidated into one tabbed Business page (Goals / Secretary / Pitches), modeled on the Knowledge Base page with deep-linkable ?tab= URLs. A single sidebar entry replaces four.

Changed

• Company Goals, Secretary, and Pitches brought to the panel's standards. Skeleton loading and offline/error states, structured fields instead of raw JSON dumps, required-note confirmation dialogs for pitch and directive decisions, and markdown rendering in the Secretary chat.

Removed

• The standalone Cockpit page. Its data duplicated the Dashboard and Metrics; its one unique element — the strategy-engine "needs your attention" signals — was relocated to the Dashboard, served by a new lightweight GET /api/cockpit/signals endpoint. The /cockpit, /company-goals, /secretary, and /pitches panel routes are all retired (404); the Goals, Secretary, and Pitches views now live under /business?tab=….

Fixed

• Agent MCP/SDK servers no longer stall on spawn. They launch with uv run --no-sync, so a workspace clone whose lockfile has drifted from the baked image no longer triggers a multi-minute dependency re-sync that left the gateway tools stuck "pending" and the developer respawning in a loop.
• open_pr no longer fails on a missing base branch. create_pr auto-creates and pushes the PR's base branch off the default branch when it is not yet on the remote, instead of returning a GitHub 422.
• Admin status overrides restore task ownership. Forcing a blocked task back to pending / in_progress now restores its pre-block assignee, so an escalated code task no longer re-enters the pool still owned by a PM and is dispatched to that PM as if it were a developer.
• A developer can idle past its own queued work. With per-dev queues, a dev whose current leaf has moved to QA now idles cleanly while its later queue items wait their turn (the orchestrator respawns it when the lane clears), instead of looping on the idle guard or claiming the next leaf out of order.
• 26 verified panel UI bugs across the dashboard, kanban, task detail, and API layer: consistent priority labels and badge sizing, dark-mode coverage, kanban drag-and-drop that prompts for the required audit note, auto-scroll in the message and mentor-chat views, corrected WebSocket reconnect counting, PATCH (not PUT) for partial task updates, working "Activate Task" and "Start Revision" actions for backlog and needs-revision tasks (no more dead-end menus), the previously-dead "New / Generate Report" buttons, a duplicate agent id, a "0h ago" timestamp, and more.

Internal

• Verb-table generation no longer emits tables for the driver-based roles (prompter, secretary), whose real tools live in their SDK drivers rather than the gateway verb surface; and the _briefing_for typed stub was aligned with its implementation so the composed choreographer type-checks under full mypy.

[0.4.0] - 2026-06-15

Added

• Business Goals — the company charter. A single CEO-owned charter (north star, prioritized objectives, constraints, operating policy) injected compactly into every agent's briefing so all work is goal-aware. GET /api/company-goals (any agent) / PUT (CEO-only), with a panel editor.
• Web research for the Board and PMs. Pluggable web_search / web_fetch exposed through a roboco-search MCP server backed by /api/research/*, with Tavily / Brave / Exa adapters and a graceful no-op when no provider is configured. The provider key stays server-side — agent containers never make the external request themselves — and a per-agent daily quota (Redis, fail-open) bounds cost.
• Pitch → approve → provision. The Board proposes a product (a "pitch"); on CEO approval the system provisions a GitHub repo per target cell, registers a Project for each (and a Product when multi-cell), and seeds one Main-PM delivery task — reusing the existing Product / coordination-task machinery. Default-off: with no provisioning token configured, approval is refused and nothing is created.
• Autonomous strategy engine (dormant). An optional second engine that watches the company against its standing goals and surfaces drift, idle, and long-stranded blocked work to the CEO (notify-only — it never spends, builds, or auto-approves). Off by default; the delivery lifecycle is unchanged.
• The Secretary — the CEO's chief-of-staff. A live conversational agent (its own role, distinct from the Prompter) the CEO chats with in the panel. It acts only under the CEO's command: it reads company state and relays dictated messages directly, but high-impact actions — editing the charter, starting / cancelling / overriding tasks, approving a pitch, announcements — are queued and run only after the CEO's explicit confirmation (the gate list). Its authority is HMAC-scoped to the secretary role and routed through the existing enforcement, never a parallel permission model.
• The Cockpit. A read-only /cockpit view answering "is the business winning, what's happening, what needs me" — the charter, delivery counts, 30-day spend vs the budget cap, pending pitches, and the strategy engine's signals. Honestly stamped basis: proxy (a proxy until real launches).

All of these are additive and opt-in or default-off — an unconfigured deployment behaves exactly as before.

[0.3.0] - 2026-06-15

Added

• In-house RAG engine. Replaced the piragi/torch retrieval stack with an in-house pgvector engine (asyncpg), then added hybrid retrieval — pgvector cosine fused with Postgres full-text ranking — retiring HyDE, plus an embed-once / concurrent-search pass that cut multi-index query latency.
• Self-hosted LLM provider with dynamic model discovery, so agents can run against a local or self-hosted model endpoint.
• Quality gates at the source. Developers run a fast quality gate at i_am_done and the full fast gate (including complexity) at their desk; QA requires a per-acceptance-criterion verdict before passing; cells run two developers in parallel with split-before-claim sizing.
• Board redraft loop — the Board can send a drafted task back to intake for an in-context re-draft before it starts.
• Transcript retention — a background sweep prunes old agent transcripts, with a panel-tunable retention window.
• tests/ type-gated under mypy — the whole test suite now type-checks in CI.

Fixed

• PR-divergence respawn-loop meltdown. Capped the PM respawn loop-gate, added CEO god-mode status override, a PR-conflict auto-resolver (rebase → close-superseded / re-merge / escalate), and sequence-ordered sibling merge; the dispatcher can now claim an ownerless awaiting_pm_review task without transitioning it.
• Git robustness. Fall back to a permitted merge method when the repo refuses the requested one, and retarget a PR's base to the default branch when the resolved base is missing on the remote.
• RAG outage. Migrated the live chunks_* tables to the in-house schema (offline-renderable migration), closed engine audit gaps, decoded jsonb metadata returned as a string by asyncpg, and kept the embedding model resident to stop ingest timeouts.
• Panel. Fixed task lifecycle (updates, merge, reassignment, copy), responsive grids + mobile overflow, the status dropdown duplicating the current status, the orchestrator-status reachability signal, and surfaced the CEO "Approve & Start" gate so it can't be missed.
• Usage attribution. Agent transcripts are attributed by an orchestrator-assigned session id, fixing zeroed token/cost capture for review-role agents.
• Composed the prompter role layer for the intake agent; aligned auditor channel permissions; made the app route-registration test robust to FastAPI 0.137; cleared an xenon complexity failure and fixable test warnings.

Security

• Documented that WebSocket authentication is REST-only and /ws/system is unauthenticated.

[0.2.0] - 2026-06-11

Added

• Provider rate-limit handling. End-to-end backpressure for LLM-provider 429s: a Redis-backed RateLimitStateTracker, a spawn gate that queues (never drops) work while a provider is rate-limited, agent parking via i_am_blocked(reason="rate_limited"), and a background probe-and-resume loop that auto-revives parked agents when the limit lifts — escalating to the CEO after repeated failed probes. Surfaced live in the panel via a rate-limit banner.
• Token usage & cost analytics. Per-agent-session token capture read from the Claude Code transcript (/usage/sync), persisted to spawn-session rows and daily rollups, with provider-aware pricing (Anthropic models priced; local/Ollama models intentionally $0). Visible on the usage dashboard.
• /ws/system operator WebSocket stream with a websocket_bridge that forwards system events from the event bus to panel clients in real time — the rate-limit lifecycle and live token/cost usage (USAGE_UPDATE / USAGE_SNAPSHOT), so the dashboard's "Token Usage & Cost" panel updates over the socket and falls back to HTTP polling when it drops.

Fixed

• Agent workspaces now install the project's dev extra (uv sync --extra dev) so spawned agents have the full make quality toolchain (ruff/mypy/xenon) and can gate their own work — closing the gap that let lint/type/complexity debt merge unchecked.
• Token-usage capture: the dashboard previously recorded zeros because nothing populated the per-session counters.
• Panel rate-limit endpoint shape (/api/system/rate-limits returns the { entries: [...] } envelope the dashboard expects) and the doubled /ws/ws/system WebSocket path.
• Control-panel logo and all /public assets returning 500 — the panel image copied them without chowning to the non-root runtime user.
• Provider-aware pricing (Opus corrected to $5/$25 per 1M; non-Anthropic models no longer warn or mis-price).

[0.1.0] - 2026-06-09

Added

• Initial public release of RoboCo — an open-source AI agent "company": a virtual organization of 20 AI agents and 1 human CEO that plans, builds, reviews, documents, and ships software.
• Organizational hierarchy: on-demand Intake, Board (Product Owner, Head of Marketing, Auditor), Main PM, and Backend / Frontend / UX-UI cells.
• Task Assistant (the intake Prompter): a live, codebase-aware chat that interviews the CEO and drafts a well-formed, board-ready task — objective, per-cell breakdown, and acceptance criteria — then launches it into the lifecycle (Board review, or straight to the Main PM).
• Agent gateway (roboco-flow, roboco-do) backed by the server-side Choreographer; intent-verb tool surface per role.
• Task lifecycle state machine with role-based transitions and git workflow (PR-before-QA, CEO approval for major work).
• A2A protocol, journals, channels/notifications, kanban, and RAG (piragi + pgvector) knowledge base.
• Next.js control panel (panel/) behind a single nginx entry point.
• Multi-agent workspace management with per-project encrypted git tokens.

[0.5.0]: https://github.com/rennf93/roboco/compare/v0.4.0...v0.5.0 [0.4.0]: https://github.com/rennf93/roboco/compare/v0.3.0...v0.4.0 [0.3.0]: https://github.com/rennf93/roboco/compare/v0.2.0...v0.3.0 [0.2.0]: https://github.com/rennf93/roboco/compare/v0.1.0...v0.2.0 [0.1.0]: https://github.com/rennf93/roboco/releases/tag/v0.1.0