v0.19.0-alpha — Structured failures, a creator dimension, and a self-reloading bridge

v0.19.0-alpha - Structured failures, a creator dimension, and a self-reloading bridge

Three of this release's four changes came from agents hitting the same wall
in different places: a command that fails in a way the caller cannot read is
indistinguishable from one that succeeded and found nothing.

Fixed

• Every failure path now carries errors. omnireach media download <url> --json reported ok: false with an empty errors list and no yt-dlp
  invocation. The root cause was not in the media layer: cli.py::_entrypoint
  rendered every ClickException as an error object with no errors key at
  all, so an agent doing envelope.get("errors", []) saw an empty list. The
  legacy error object is still emitted for pre-0.19 callers. (#45, #47)
• Crash diagnostics no longer corrupt stdout. A traceback used to be
  printed to stdout, where an agent is parsing JSON. It now goes to stderr,
  with a real envelope on stdout carrying the traceback inside it. (#47)
• MCP exception fallbacks return real envelopes. Every tool's crash path
  answered {"error": "..."}, which none of the declared outputSchemas
  accept. Each now returns a valid SearchEnvelope, FetchEnvelope,
  MediaEnvelope or AuthorEnvelope. (#47)
• Douyin fresh-cookie flake is retried, not backed off. Measured: 1/10
  failures on a cold start, 4/10 once rate-limited, and a 1s gap failed as
  often as a 5s gap. More attempts help; waiting between them does not. Four
  attempts now share one timeout budget. (#47)

Added

• omnireach author and the omnireach_author MCP tool. Keyword search
  matches captions, so ranking a creator query by likes returns strangers —
  omnireach search --on douyin "彭十六" returned three videos, none of them
  hers. The catalog dimension resolves the account and walks it:

  omnireach author "彭十六" --order likes --limit 8 --timeout 300
  # → 彭十六elf, 28,195,000 followers, scanned 355 works, complete=true, 43.6s

  AuthorEnvelope reuses SearchResult for results, so anything that reads
  a search envelope reads a catalog. Data comes from Douyin's own
  aweme/v1/web/aweme/post/, called from the logged-in page context where it
  needs no a_bogus/X-Bogus signing, so likes/comments/shares/
  collects are exact rather than the zero-fills a card scrape produces.
  views is reported unknown because statistics.play_count is always 0 on
  this endpoint. (#46, #48)

• omnireach bridge reload. Every change under
  omnireach/chrome_extension/ used to require a human to click Reload at
  chrome://extensions: bridge install only copies files, a running Chrome
  ignores them, and an idle MV3 service-worker restart does not pick them up
  either. Chrome 136+ stopped exposing extension targets to CDP, so there was
  nothing to attach to. The extension now reloads itself via
  chrome.runtime.reload() in 1.8 seconds, and the service worker and
  offscreen document both come back on their own. (#51)

Documentation

• CLAUDE.md forbade download / parse / fetch-content subcommands that
  v0.17 and v0.18 had already shipped, and its version history stopped at
  v0.11. Both now describe what exists. docs/releases/ was missing v0.15.0,
  v0.16.0 and v0.16.1; they are backfilled from the published releases. (#50)

Real upstream verification

• Creator catalog: docs/verification/douyin-author.md
  — including the 19 consecutive empty pages mid-catalog that make any
  empty-page tolerance truncate silently, and the fact that a handle which
  does not exist returns Douyin's recommended accounts, so a name-resolving
  parser can quietly answer with a stranger's works.
• Bridge self-reload: docs/verification/bridge-self-reload.md
  — a round trip between two installed extension versions, with a real
  omnireach author call afterwards to prove the bridge was functional rather
  than merely answering system.ping.

Compatibility

The bundled Chrome extension is 0.4.0. NATIVE_EXTENSION_MIN_VERSION is
deliberately not raised: a user who has not reloaded the extension keeps
every other command working, and omnireach bridge status --json reports
reload_required.

485 tests.