brainiac v0.20.40

Fixed

• brain interview asks questions again. The nightly interview asked
  nothing from 2026-09-23 on: the stale-note finder sampled 10 notes and
  found 9 undated ones, which it skips, and the orphan finder spent its
  three-question budget on the first three notes with nowhere to link. Stale
  now samples 60, and orphans count questions and searches separately. A dry
  run on the reference vault asks 3 questions where it asked 0.
• A linked picture no longer quarantines a whole .pptx. python-pptx
  raises ValueError for a picture linked to an external file, and the
  handler caught only AttributeError, so one linked shape quarantined a real
  8-slide deck four nights running. The read now sits inside the per-picture
  guard.
• brain update updates every project copy of a plugin, and a stopped
  update fails the deploy. A plugin installed at project scope has one
  registry entry per project; brain doctor read only the first and
  brain update ran claude plugin update at user scope, which fails when no
  user-scope copy exists. That stop happened before the workspaces were
  re-staged, and the release deploy phase passed anyway because a stopped
  update writes no before/after table (v0.20.39 left both workspaces on
  0.20.38). The doctor now judges every copy and lists the stale ones, the
  update runs once per stale copy from its project folder, and a report with
  no before/after table fails the phase.

Changed

• Documentation overhaul (2026-09-26). README.md is a front door again
  (what, why, one install path per surface, first search, update, where next)
  with absolute links so the PyPI page renders them; docs/README.md maps every
  shipped document by kind (how-to, reference, explanation, walk-through);
  docs/install/README.md is numbered steps per platform, with the explanation
  moved to docs/install/new-owner.md. Fact fixes across the install set:
  CLAUDE.md imports AGENTS-core.md, the maintenance task is named by its
  label, the Chat tab wires through brain connect or the .mcpb, seven links
  to files the public export drops are gone, and CONTRIBUTING.md carries the
  measured test count and a docs-with-the-change rule. The plugin manifests and
  the marketplace carry short, current descriptions plus homepage and
  repository; each plugin folder has a README that lists what it runs, sends
  and fetches; /brainiac-health resolves its script through
  ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} so it works from a plugin install; pyproject.toml
  carries project URLs. Two closed-stacks s07 walk records under
  docs/operations/ (the owner-run protocol and its relayed transcript) no
  longer ship in the public export; the cutover-and-reversal runbook that
  brain doctor cites still does.