v0.9.0 — Live Mode (G-5a)

Brings the "snapshot → live" graduation to 3000+ weekly MCP installs.

What's new

brand_brandcode_live — toggle Live Mode on a connected Brandcode Studio brand. When on, read-only tools (brand_runtime, brand_check, brand_audit_content, brand_check_compliance, brand_preview, brand_status) refresh from the hosted runtime on each call within a short cache TTL (default 60s). Governance edits in Brand Console propagate on the next tool call without a manual sync.

brand_runtime live routing — when Live Mode is on, the runtime is extracted from the hosted package and tagged runtime_origin: "live". Supports hosted package shapes pkg.runtime, pkg.brandInstance.runtime, and "package is a runtime".

Silent network-failure fallback — every live-aware tool falls back to the on-disk mirror when the Studio pull fails. The failure surfaces as live.fallback_reason in the response, never as a user-visible error.

Git-connected repo tools (C-1/C-7) — brand_connect_repo and brand_repo_status wire a GitHub repo's .brand/ directory as the source of truth for a hosted brand; Studio polls every five minutes.

Backward compatibility

• Live Mode is opt-in, per-session. The 3000+ existing MCP users who never connect to Studio see zero behavior change.
• ConnectorConfig extended with optional liveMode, liveModeActivatedAt, liveCacheTTLSeconds. Existing connector configs without these fields default to Live Mode off.
• Write tools (extract/build/mutate) stay local-first; Live Mode is read-only by design.

Testing

402 → 430 tests (+28 covering cache TTL, live-source branches, tool guards, runtime live routing). Baseline preserved.