Nexus v1.1.0 — Containment

Nexus v1.1.0 — Containment

Executive Summary

Nexus v1.1.0 "Containment" is the first Pilot operational release of the AI Orchestration
Control Plane. It was validated through a real, end-to-end operational bring-up — not a mock harness —
exercising all nine subsystems on live infrastructure: boot, operator onboarding, scheduler, email,
research, briefing, runtime execution, checkpoint recovery, and Discord. The autonomous agent
runtime, developed under the internal codename "Hermes", is promoted to a first-class Nexus Agent.

Classification: Pilot Ready (9/9 stages live-validated). Not yet Production Ready — see Known
Limitations.

Major Features

• Nexus Agent (Hermes → Nexus rebranding) — registry id nexus, back-compat alias for legacy
  hermes records and imports; third-party Nous Research references intentionally preserved.
• Nexus Agent: Experimental → Pilot — fail-fast init, tunable step budget, honest terminal
  lifecycle, cancellation, and resume-from-checkpoint (H-2/H-4).
• Sandbox: Pilot Safe — default-secure containment, fail-closed execution, S-3 startup gate.
• Live operator onboarding — python -m nexus onboard, safe read-only staged validation.
• Multi-provider LLM gateway — Groq → Zenmux → OpenRouter (free) fallback chain.
• Email + Discord notifications — both delivering on real infrastructure.

Architecture Improvements

• No architectural redesign — registry, governance, sandbox, scheduler-port, and event-sourced
  memory boundaries preserved; ADR history intact.
• Orchestrator exit-status finalization honors the agent's truthful terminal status (H-4).
• Config alignment reads deployed .env keys (DISCORD_OWNER_ID, NOTIFY_SMTP_*,
  NOTIFY_EMAIL_FROM) without a parallel credential store; .env remains the single source of truth.

Operational Validation Results (9/9)

Stage	Verdict
Boot (A-001 + S-3 gates)	✅
Operator onboarding	✅
Scheduler	✅
Email (SMTP)	✅
Research	✅
Briefing	✅
Runtime (Nexus Agent)	✅
Recovery (checkpoint resume)	✅
Discord	✅

Live Integration Results

• Email: real SMTP delivery to operator (smtp.gmail.com:587) after a one-line double-STARTTLS fix.
• Discord: bot connected to guild, "Welcome to Nexus" embed posted to #general,
  message_id 1519643857816649821.
• Research: 20 findings parsed from a live RSS feed, LLM-scored and persisted.
• Recovery: interrupt → timed_out → fresh-adapter resume → completed, no corruption.

Performance Metrics (observed 2026-06-25)

• Tests: 219 passed (~45 s); ruff clean; mypy clean (61 files).
• LLM latency (Groq primary): ~120 ms.
• Email delivery: ~8.8 s incl. handshake.
• Scheduler: 4 jobs executed (started:4/completed:4).
• Checkpoints persisted: 39; executions: 3; agent steps: 5.

Upgrade Notes

• No database migration required. Fresh schema from current models via create_all; existing
  v1.1.0-column databases need no change.
• Legacy runner="hermes" / hermes_agent still resolve; import the runtime from
  nexus.execution.runners.nexus_agent (old hermes module path removed).
• LLM defaults are now free OpenRouter models; set GROQ_API_KEY / ZENMUX_API for the full
  fallback chain or a paid/BYOK OpenRouter key for sustained load.
• Singular DISCORD_OWNER_ID env key now supported for A-001 owner resolution.

Known Limitations

• Free-tier LLM rate-limits under sustained load (mitigated, not eliminated).
• create_all-only schema management; Alembic migrations incomplete.
• .env DISCORD_*_CHANNEL ids not yet read into config (delivery works via channel resolution).
• Gemini / Claude runtimes remain generic shell runners (Experimental).
• No production web SearchProvider for agent tools.
• In-code version string still reads 0.1.0 (pre-existing debt; deferred to v1.2).

Roadmap toward v1.2

• Durable/BYOK LLM capacity and rate-limit alerting.
• Adopt a real schema-migration tool (Alembic) and retire manual recreate.
• Map .env Discord channel ids into config for deterministic routing.
• Real Gemini/Claude CLI runtime integration.
• Production SearchProvider.
• Version-string alignment; broader soak/load testing on J5/J6 health metrics.