Feral v2026.07.14

Hotfix. Everyone on 2026.07.13 should take this update.

Fixed

• A crashed sidecar could kill the app permanently. If the sidecar ever went
  down hard, it left its lockfile behind with its process id in it. The guard
  that is supposed to recognise an abandoned lock asked only "does a process
  with this number still exist?" — and operating systems reuse process ids. On
  the report that surfaced this, Windows had handed the dead sidecar's id to
  svchost, a system process. The probe came back "exists, but you may not
  touch it", the lock was declared alive, and the sidecar refused to start on
  every launch from then on. The app was dead, and the only cure was deleting a
  file the user had never heard of.

  Two things were wrong. "You may not touch it" was read as alive, when it
  actually proves the opposite: the sidecar runs as you, so a process you cannot
  even signal cannot be it. And more fundamentally, a process id is not an
  identity — fix the first half and the next recycled id, this time landing on
  something you do own, would have looked alive and bricked the app just the
  same.

  So liveness is now something the sidecar has to demonstrate: a running one
  touches its lockfile every few seconds, and a lock nobody has touched in a
  minute is treated as abandoned, whatever id it claims. A dead process cannot
  keep touching a file, no matter who inherits its number. The case where the OS
  hands the new sidecar the dead one's id is closed too.

  If you are stuck on 2026.07.13 and cannot get past "Feral Agent went offline",
  delete ~/.feral/agent/.writer.lock and restart — then update.