v0.12.9 — RTK Token Optimization (−80%)

Supersedes v0.13.1, which was tagged earlier the same day and withdrawn —
see "Reverted" below. This release is v0.13.1 minus the REPL mode switch: the
RTK token work and the Telegram search verb, nothing else.

Reverted

• :gazelle / :coder in the plain REPL is withdrawn. Shipped in v0.13.1;
  pulled after a coder-mode task looped on one step ("Writing the HTML
  structure…" repeated until it hit the token ceiling, ending after 7 turns).
  The mode branch is inert while replMode === 'coder' and the coder path was
  unchanged beneath it, so the loop is probably not from this — but a release is
  not the place to find out. :coder and :gazelle again work only inside a
  session started with --gazelle; in the plain REPL they are unhandled and get
  sent to the model as a task, as before. Under investigation; RTK's compression
  of run_shell output is the first suspect, since a model that cannot see
  whether a write landed will retry it.

Changed

• Shell and git tool output now goes through RTK — 80% fewer input tokens per
  session. RTK was installed on the machine, but its Claude hook only rewrites
  commands typed at a terminal. Aura's own tools shell out through Node's
  exec/execSync directly, so run_shell, the git tool, and the Telegram
  bot's execShell bypassed the proxy entirely: raw git diff, git log and
  grep output landed in the context window uncompressed, and the bloat
  compounded as a session grew. Each of those call sites now prefixes rtk
  (skipped when the command already starts with it), and gitStatus/gitDiff
  invoke rtk git … explicitly.

  Measured over the same three tasks — an uncommitted-changes review, a
  TypeScript compiler-API audit, and a changelog web page build — run four times
  as the patches went in:

  Run	State	Input tokens	Turns	Tool calls
  1	no RTK (raw node exec)	1,286,806	40	60
  2	telegram-bot.ts patched	946,293	39	70
  3	tools.ts patched	397,519	16	28
  4	fully optimized	253,039	13	23

  80.3% fewer input tokens and 67.5% fewer turns for identical work. Compressed
  summaries don't just cost less than raw terminal noise — the model converges
  faster on them. Full write-up in rtk-optimization-report.md.

  RTK stays optional. Prefixing unconditionally would have made it a hard
  runtime dependency of a published package — every run_shell call on a machine
  without it returning "rtk: command not found". util/rtk.ts probes PATH once
  per process (a filesystem scan, no which subprocess) and passes the bare
  command through when RTK isn't there. AURA_RTK=0 forces the raw command even
  when it is installed, which is what you want when checking exactly what a tool
  ran; AURA_RTK=1 skips the probe.

Added

• SEARCH: for the Telegram bot. The bot could run shell commands, send
  files and take webcam stills, but had no way to look anything up — so it
  answered questions about current events from stale weights, or claimed it
  could not search at all. SEARCH: <query> now hits DuckDuckGo's lite HTML
  endpoint (no API key, no SDK) and returns the top five titles, URLs and
  snippets. The action prompt tells the agent to reach for it first when it
  lacks up-to-date information, and the "never claim you cannot…" instruction
  now covers searching alongside sending and photographing.