v0.12.18 — dependable joins and truthful operator failures

v0.12.18 — dependable joins and truthful operator failures

v0.12.18 tightens the paths that decide whether a meeting bot really joined,
is still alive, and failed for a reason an operator can act on. It also makes
the MCP front door stream correctly, fixes Lite startup, and removes several
false-success states from bot creation and deployment.

Meeting reliability

• Google Meet lobby bots are no longer reaped at five minutes while still
  legitimately waiting for admission (#862).
• Meet host denial wins over ambient reCAPTCHA and terminates with a typed,
  non-retryable reason (#840).
• The browser locale is deterministic (en-US by default), with its resolved
  language recorded for diagnosis (#856). The English lobby path was walked
  live; arbitrary non-English joining is not claimed.
• Teams no longer treats generic alert UI as evidence that the bot was
  removed; the staged bot stayed active for 207 seconds under the live removal
  monitor (#600).
• Mixed-lane turns without a resolved participant name now use the stable
  Speaker label instead of leaking the internal seg_N cluster identifier
  (#890). Human name binding remains a later attribution-quality step.
• Teams authentication redirects and non-admitted bot deaths now preserve
  their real causes instead of degrading into admission timeouts or
  reason: None (#915, #926). These external failure shapes are
  machine-proven; neither recurred during the release witness.
• Stop during pre-admission now reaches the phase-aware withdraw path and
  cleans up the workload (#889). Meet's host-side knock can still persist;
  that distinct visible withdrawal gap remains
  #839.

Truthful APIs and operator behavior

• A bot workload that never starts no longer yields false 201; POST /bots
  returns 502 with the cause and marks the meeting failed immediately (#718).
• Invalid native meeting IDs containing URL/query characters fail at intake
  with 422; callers should use meeting_url and passcode (#892).
• Meeting API remains available for durable reads during Redis loss and
  reports Redis degradation on /health; Redis-dependent Stop fails narrowly
  and retryably (#809).
• Redis keyspace reconciliation is no longer on the ten-second collector hot
  loop, removing the known /health saturation amplifier (#893).
• The webhook introspection capture is bounded, removing its unbounded
  in-process retention source (#803).

MCP, webhooks, and identity

• MCP streamable HTTP is available through the authenticated gateway /mcp
  front door. Sessioned GET /mcp opens and keeps its SSE stream instead of
  being buffered into a timeout (#795, #921).
• Admin token mint honors JSON scopes, keeps query compatibility, and refuses
  unsupported body fields loudly (#922).
• Core now records recent webhook delivery outcomes in a per-user,
  secret-safe ledger exposed at GET /user/webhook/deliveries (#841 core
  half). The dashboard does not display that ledger yet; the consumer remains
  open in v0.12.20.

Deployment

• Helm migrations use the same pinned image tag as the deployed release
  (#900).
• Admin API retries transient database DNS/connect races with bounded backoff
  (#901).
• Vexa Lite pins all service environments to Python 3.12, restoring reliable
  admin API startup and first-run key provisioning (#927).
• The no-STT contract is documented truthfully: transcription is required by
  default and missing configuration fails loudly; capture-only is an explicit
  transcribe_enabled=false choice (#532).

Upgrading

From any v0.12.x release, pin IMAGE_TAG=v0.12.18. The guarded :v012
pointer moves only after the published image set, value gate, and release
witness are green. There is no database schema migration in this batch.

Behavior refinements to note:

• token JSON bodies reject unknown fields with 422;
• native meeting IDs carrying URL characters reject with 422;
• bot workload start failure now returns 502, not 201;
• /mcp and /user/webhook/deliveries are new gateway surfaces.

Artifact identity

The stable tags are same-byte aliases of frozen release candidates; they were
not rebuilt after validation. Production revision 103 and meetings 24740/24741
witnessed the stage2 Bot at
sha256:9442a44558fd48950208cbef40673cc7a0b2feb41f380964fc74a0e25bf18fae.
The public Bot below is the packet3 replacement: its runtime inputs are
tree-identical to the tagged source and its image/Compose validation passed,
but it was not deployed or human-witnessed on hosted stage or production.

image	:v0.12.18 digest
vexaai/v012-admin-api	sha256:49a8bd29268250cb37976c3170fde41c960f00d55f31ef4a42e17062b968b114
vexaai/v012-runtime	sha256:653fcd1a8edbc925a174a55fe34863d414c56c8ef367a94b449f89a5a3a5c4e1
vexaai/v012-agent-worker	sha256:d4c637ca1ca9c05ff6de852778299da665374ed9d59115088aa030d90212bf15
vexaai/v012-agent-api	sha256:af4f2bf2008ed2c910904e82155e06d3b0e747d04d7c7ccb9f14208b17c49bae
vexaai/v012-meeting-api	sha256:d1db225472d54f0b087e1b7a342c465b01b7e7f042372a730d3b32e0c6836f4a
vexaai/v012-gateway	sha256:4b9bd9d6d33f4f2ec8df0b9530b02942482c0399ec71f39722fb06f48aae55df
vexaai/v012-mcp	sha256:72158d83293ce48c1cfd5c9bd8e2762e72a2da63d962fdbdbf7fe9b09daa8755
vexaai/v012-terminal	sha256:a668ad43e225364422b225939fad057bff33db8b5bb3d6c341e1b625c5bde008
vexaai/vexa-bot	sha256:a7f8feae7870b722e3542fb7cb054ff7c092e62f4c5a6b6a3b63e52f8cd1fe47
vexaai/vexa-lite	sha256:5d0b6f865afe726109bb326361b917a3d9f762d64abbeea0826744134162d051

Hosted production directly held the listed admin API, runtime, meeting API,
and gateway bytes. It held the stage2 Bot digest recorded above, not the
packet3 public Bot digest. Agent worker, agent API, MCP, Terminal, packet3 Bot,
and Lite are proven by published-candidate validation; they are not claimed as
hosted production workloads.

Known boundaries

• Host-visible graceful lobby withdrawal remains #839.
• Dashboard webhook Delivery History remains #841.
• Teams auth-redirect and Zoom non-admission reason fixes have exact-head
  machine evidence but no live recurrence in the witness window.
• Jitsi hosted meeting detail remains #937.
• Real audio→words is witnessed live; the standalone machine wav→words oracle
  remains deferred.
• Hosted transcription currently has a functional Cloudflare fallback, while
  primary health remains false and direct BBB was not exercised.
• Hosted Account/API-key management currently has a webapp-to-Admin-API
  compatibility incident (#942,
  platform carry vexa-platform#127).
  It is not delivered or closed by this OSS release.

Credits

Contributors: Joseph Yaksich, Felix-Ayush, and Dmitry Grankin.

Reporter credit: Valerie Phoenix (#927).

Community PR validator: Dmitry Grankin.

Release witness: Dmitry Grankin, corroborated by dashboard, bot, meeting API,
Redis, Postgres, and Kubernetes evidence.

Delivery guarantees

#	Guarantee	Evidence
1	Users pull the bytes that were proved	exact candidate map; stable alias digest equality
2	Compose, Lite, and Helm install paths work to their declared scope	base-eight published-candidate validation plus bounded packet3 Bot/Lite validation
3	Real audio produces speaker-attributed words	hosted stage and production human witness; standalone wav→words remains unclaimed
4	Fresh empty VM works	not claimed; no fresh-VM leg was run
5	Existing behavior remains covered	v0.10 compatibility, bot-spawn, Compose, Lite, Helm, and arm64 validation
6	Each image contains what its name promises	image-identity validation
7	A human witnessed the hosted value	stage2 hosted witness plus production meetings 24740/24741; packet3 Bot is validation-only
8	Every batch change has acceptance evidence	21-PR value map plus inherited #890 and exact-head checks
9	Notes state coverage boundaries	this document
10	Moving pointers change only after validation	release value/witness gates plus the release-promote environment