v0.15.0

Added

• The squad had a front door for weak inputs and none for absent ones. The intake gate validates requirement artifacts when they exist; a request with nothing written down went straight into research on framing nobody examined. The new opt-in discovery gate (squad-src/.github/instructions/squad/squad-discovery-gate.instructions.md) fires on the inverse trigger — no input artifact, a goal rather than a settled task — and produces a brief the intake gate then validates. The two gates chain rather than loop.
• It is offered, never automatic, and never unattended. Validation can be automatic because assessing a document is something an agent does alone; ideation cannot, because the value of a brainstorm is the human's ideas. The coordinator asks once per topic and honours a discovery=quick|standard|deep|skip input on /squad and /squad-federation. On a Watch Mode or headless run no offer is made, a discovery= argument is ignored, and the triggering payload becomes the intake gate's input instead.
• The offer is scoped to the product and full profiles, the only rosters carrying the roles the gate dispatches — analyst writes the brief at every depth and no other profile seeds it. Elsewhere the gate is silent rather than escalating, which is the deliberate difference from intake-validator: an input that exists and goes unvalidated is a skipped check worth interrupting for, while an unrequested brainstorm is not. An explicit discovery= is still honoured on any roster, with one combined escalation naming the roles it must add.
• The dispatched roles interview the user rather than answering for them. Each puts its questions through the question tool one at a time and waits, the same discipline Squad SQL Migration Advisor already follows here. A role that cannot reach the user returns its outstanding questions instead of inventing the answers, and the session stops — a brief built from an agent's assumptions is the failure the gate exists to prevent.
• Depth tiers scale the session to the decision and introduce no new role: quick dispatches analyst; standard adds designer (resolved to DT Coach) for How-Might-We framing and divergent ideation; deep adds challenger and experimenter. Only analyst writes a file — the brief, in the existing analyst Deliverable Root — so one session leaves one artifact.
• The discarded options are recorded with their reasons. The Squad Scribe writes a ## Discovery Verdict to decisions.md (including on a decline, which is what stops the gate re-offering), carrying the framing, every option considered with why it was chosen or discarded, objections, the riskiest assumption, and the open questions research inherits.
• Federation asks the question once and applies it per qualifying sub-squad, the same ask-once contract that already governs member naming and the approval channel. Each product or full sub-squad still runs its own session and writes its own brief and verdict under its own root; sub-squads on other profiles run unchanged, and the federation plan meta-stage never brainstorms on a sub-squad's behalf.

Changed

• The published docs did not describe how a fix ships without shipping everything else. Added the hotfix procedure, the ref release input, and the release-merge-back label to the contributing and maintaining pages, and documented the rolling pre-release channel on getting started and troubleshooting.

• Every merge cut a release. A fragment landing on main assembled the CHANGELOG, bumped apm.yml, and tagged immediately, and the daily hve-core sync cut a release of its own on top, so a quiet week still produced several versions and nothing was ever installed before it shipped. Releasing is now a deliberate act: .github/workflows/release-prep.yml runs on manual dispatch only, ships everything pending as one version at the highest bump any fragment asked for, and nothing goes out on a timer.

• Merged work is now installable before it ships. .github/workflows/preview.yml keeps a single GitHub pre-release in sync with main, tagged with the version the pending fragments resolve to (v0.15.0-pre) and force-moved on every merge, so a change can be installed and tested the moment it lands. It only reads: no fragment is consumed, no version is bumped, and CHANGELOG.md is untouched. A quick fix can ship as soon as it is verified there, while a larger change sits in preview until it is ready.

• The hve-core sync queues instead of releasing. .github/workflows/sync-hve-core.yml now records a pin move as a change fragment and pushes it, leaving the release to a maintainer. The cast-delta guard and the Watch Mode handoff are unchanged.

• A fix can ship without shipping what is not ready. A release carries a commit, so a tag cut from the default branch contains everything merged into it. release-prep.yml and release.yml accept a ref input, which lets a hotfix be cut off the last release tag and released on its own, leaving the pending batch and its preview untouched. release.yml also declines the Latest badge when the version it is cutting is lower than the current latest, and pr-validation.yml accepts a release-merge-back label so the hotfix can be merged back with the release state Release Prep already wrote.

• Invoke-ReleasePrep.ps1 gained -SectionOutFile and -InstallRef so the preview can render the pending release notes and point the install snippet at the preview tag without consuming anything.

• Updated hve-core dependency pin to 2a333df (2a333df05cc5aa85d2dc9db834958b717c888bf9).

• Updated hve-core dependency pin to c91c782 (c91c7823188fef4d1ca7558c1c868b05be3aa3c2).

• Updated hve-core dependency pin to 26b9712 (26b97122e19d6ff271b0b6f0401c92bb12eda03b).

Consumer install

Pin to this version:

apm install "Peter-N91/hve-squad#v0.15.0"