0.40.0

Added

• aep is now the canonical command, with protocol retained as an exact stdout, stderr and exit status compatibility alias.
• The optional aep-ess-evidence crate converts the closed standalone ESS conformance report into AEP ess_conformance evidence without linking AEP to ESS modeling types.
• release.source and release.dependency-chain profiles now govern source release verification and provider-first dependency promotion. Their workflows require default-branch provenance, repository gates, review, convergence evidence, and explicit human approval before any post-merge release is created.
• Public harness-integration documentation now gives the local protocol drive installation and run sequence, the free native comparison command, and a feature/confinement matrix for Claude Code, Codex, and the b10x native loop. It distinguishes an inner harness transcript, an outer metaharness attestation, and substrate measurements, and states where Codex is not yet a drive selector rather than turning absence into support.

Changed

• Workspace dependencies were refreshed to their current compatible releases. The direct cryptographic and JSON Schema dependencies move to sha2 0.11 and jsonschema 0.52; digest rendering now formats bytes explicitly instead of relying on the removed LowerHex wrapper.