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v0.4.0 — M4 release: the Autonomous Layer (opt-in)

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@Kevin-Tucuxi Kevin-Tucuxi released this 01 Jun 06:58
· 52 commits to main since this release
b7f4d2b

v0.4.0 — M4 release: the Autonomous Layer (opt-in), platform operability, and a docs/Learn honesty sweep

Status: DRAFT for the v0.4.0 tag. Attorney legal-substance walk-through cleared (gate 1).
Branch ↔ main reconciliation is done (merge d336c66; origin/main is now an ancestor)
and api + gateway __version__ are bumped to 0.4.0. All post-merge gates pass. What
remains is the merge to main + the annotated v0.4.0 tag — see "Release readiness" below.

Milestone 4 turns LQ.AI from an assistant you drive into one that can also run on its own — but
only when you opt in, and only inside hard brakes
. The layer is off by default; nothing runs
autonomously until an operator turns it on per-user in Settings. Every autonomous run is bounded by
a cost cap, an external halt + idle watchdog, and per-phase tool limits, and emits an inspectable
receipt. This release also ships the operability surfaces that make the layer discoverable and
self-explanatory, and a thorough reconciliation of the docs and Learn content to what the code
actually does.


Headline — the Autonomous Layer (M4)

A new Autonomous area (opt-in, off by default; enabled per-user in Settings → Autonomous).

What it runs

  • Schedules — a chosen skill or playbook on a cron cadence, optionally scoped to a knowledge
    base and/or matter, with a per-run cost cap.
  • Watches — a run triggered when a document is attached to a chosen knowledge base.
  • Run now — a one-off, on-demand run of a skill/playbook so you can see the result (and its
    receipt) before arming a schedule or watch.

How it runs — a LangGraph phase machine (intake → analysis → drafting → ethics review →
delivery) that performs real in-loop agentic work through the same guarded chokepoint as the rest
of the platform: every tool call (retrieve / run-skill / run-playbook) passes through
guarded_tool_call with audit + OpenTelemetry spans, and a tolerant structured-output parser that
completes honestly rather than crashing on malformed model output.

Safety brakes (all live, all leave a receipt)

  • R4 — cost cap. Per-trigger max_cost_usd (default $5, configurable via
    autonomous_default_max_cost_usd); a run that would overspend is halted with
    terminal_reason = cost_cap_reached. Live-verified during fresh-install acceptance.
  • R5 — external halt + idle watchdog. A run can be halted from the UI; a cron watchdog moves an
    idle run running → paused → halted over two idle ticks.
  • R6 — per-phase tool limits. Each phase is bounded in how many guarded calls it may make.

Where results land

  • Sessions — every run with its chronological, inspectable receipt.
  • Memory — per-user curated memory (keep / edit / dismiss / delete); only kept items are
    injected.
  • Precedents — a precedent board (propose_precedent), with promote-to-Matter.
  • Proposals — project-context proposals (accept / reject).
  • Notifications — in-app notification rail with an unread badge; best-effort email
    dispatch (SMTP transport, timeout-bounded — in-app is the source of truth).

Opt-in enforcement — mutate endpoints are gated on the per-user autonomous_enabled flag
(read + halt stay open so you can always inspect and stop); schedule/watch spawn paths skip
opted-out users.


Platform operability (Phase 1 of the platform-cohesion build, design §4)

Made the (off-by-default) layer discoverable and honest about its own scope:

  • §4.1 Home discoverability signpost — an Autonomous card on Home for all users; links a
    not-yet-enabled user straight to the opt-in (Settings → Autonomous), or to the Autonomous
    area when already on. Resolves the chicken-and-egg where the tab was hidden until enabled and
    nothing pointed to the toggle.
  • §4.2 Configure / education tab — a plain-language page explaining On/Off, Schedules vs
    Watches, Run-now, where results land, and the R4/R5/R6 safety model; plus instructive
    empty-states on Sessions / Schedules / Watches.
  • §4.3 Cost-cap field in the schedule/watch create modals, and readable target/KB/matter
    names
    in list rows (no more raw IDs).
  • §4.4 Run-now — backend POST /autonomous/run-now (trigger_kind='manual', reusing the
    executor + brakes), its API client, and the Sessions-page UI + Cypress smoke.
  • §4.5 Tabular honesty fix — corrected a Citation-Engine overclaim in the tabular docs to
    describe display-only source-chunk references (DE-309).

Documentation & Learn honesty sweep (M4-D2)

A pass to make every user-facing claim match the shipped code:

  • Rewrote HONEST-STATE as the M1–M4 capability truth-map and reconciled README, PRD §3.10 +
    brake registers, architecture, db-schema (migrations 0001–0045), observability (spans / attrs /
    audit actions), security boundary registers (R4/R5/R6 → shipped), and the tabular / citation /
    skill-authoring / quickstart docs to source.
  • New docs/autonomous-layer.md feature reference; ADR 0013 for the autonomous-layer design.
  • Learn: corrected stale playgrounds and pages (including a fabricated skill list and a stale
    "M4 planned" status), and added 4 new How-It-Works playgrounds — Autonomous flow, Autonomous
    primitives, Intake bridges, KB hybrid retrieval, Matters/Org-profile/Privilege-tier — each
    field-checked against source.

Fixes & hardening

  • DE-325build_receipt call sites hardened so a receipt-build failure can't crash the
    worker; brake-halted (R4/R5) sessions still surface their terminal_reason.
  • DE-326 — fresh-install worker/api alembic-migration race fixed in docker-compose.yml
    (single migrator; workers wait for api-healthy).
  • Standard-cron DoM/DoW OR-semantics + poison-schedule guards; naive-datetime rejection in
    retrieve_chunks since-mode; race-safe precedent upsert.

Schema

  • Migration head 0045 (per-trigger max_cost_usd on watches + schedules). Phase 1 added no new
    migration.

Honest scope — what did not ship (deferred)

  • DE-287 — Word add-in in-pane skill/playbook execution; the add-in surface remains deep-link
    placeholders + an inert tier badge by design.
  • DE-309 / DE-310 — tabular per-cell resolvable citations / per-cell cost+tier telemetry
    (cells persist cost_usd: "0", tier_used: null; the pre-flight estimator is unaffected).
  • DE-319 — LangGraph held at 0.2 for M4 (0.2 → 1.x migration deferred).
  • DE-321 / DE-322 — watch firing under a future KB-sharing model; playbook/project FK
    ownership validation on schedule/watch create.
  • DE-323 / DE-324 — autonomous proposals on the Matter detail page; a global-chrome
    notification bell.
  • DE-327 — Helm/k8s worker-migration parity (the DE-326 single-migrator guarantee lives only
    in compose; the Helm chart has no worker deployments yet).
  • DE-328skill_inputs collected in the UI don't yet reach the model for non-templated
    skills (gateway assembler change; first of the post-M4 Donna backend asks).

The platform-cohesion design's §3 model and §5 roadmap (Phases 2–5) are recommendation-only and
were intentionally not built in this release.


Release readiness

Branch ↔ main reconciliation — DONE. feat/lqvern-m4-autonomous had diverged from main at
d54df6b (before v0.3.1) and was missing 10 main-only commits. Merge d336c66 brought them all in
origin/main is now an ancestor of the branch. The merged-in commits:

main commit PR what
8b8e549 #96 DE-305 default-install fix — bridge vars ${VAR:-} not ${VAR:?}
82d7874 #97 version bump 0.3.0 → 0.3.1
3e5809b #98 CI: don't upload SBOM as a Release asset
0101b65 #99/#101 remove dead paddleocr placeholder breaking --profile local (now DE-320)
4df3b9b #102 chat-receipts: surface anonymization_applied + message_id
7c7ce14 #103 gateway: persist inference_routing_log on streamed completions
9672ef4 #104 observability.md span/attribute correction
438198c #105 document /v1/models alias fields
5df44b7 #106 add ROADMAP.md + README contributor anchors

Four doc conflicts were resolved keeping the more-recent/accurate side while preserving both sides'
substance (PRD §3.10 dedup + kept-both DE sets incl. DE-320; HONEST-STATE §9 PaddleOCR correction;
observability §3 source-reconciliation; the alignment guide's shipped propose_precedent). api +
gateway __version__ are bumped to 0.4.0.

Post-merge gates — all green: web check:lq-ai 0 errors + vitest 692/692; api ruff/mypy
clean + pytest 95 passed/276 skipped; gateway ruff/mypy --strict clean + pytest 529 passed/2
skipped.

Remaining steps (maintainer):

  1. Merge feat/lqvern-m4-autonomousmain (fast-forward is possible since origin/main is an
    ancestor; a --no-ff merge commit is fine too).
  2. Tag v0.4.0 (annotated, using the message above), push the tag to both remotes — the existing
    Release workflow builds + signs the images and attaches the SBOM.
  3. Optionally rebuild the live stack (docker compose build web && up -d web) on the merged main.

Drafted from the main..feat/lqvern-m4-autonomous inventory; reconciled branch HEAD d336c66
(post-merge, 0.4.0). Per-task review trail and verification results are in the Phase-1 plan and the
docs/LQVern/HANDOFF-2026-05-31-… brief.