Cortex 1.6.11

Cortex 1.6.11

Cortex 1.6.11 turns skill self-evolution from an implicit pattern detector into an operator-governed lifecycle. The release keeps the existing harness model intact while adding health states, persisted proposals, and CLI controls so skill improvement can be inspected, accepted, rejected, and audited instead of silently drifting over time.

Highlights

• Governed skill evolution

  • Skills now carry runtime health: strong, healthy, needs_review, quarantined, or deprecated.
  • Execution outcomes update utility and health, allowing weak skills to lose automatic priority and severely weak skills to stop auto-activating.
  • Repeated tool-call patterns can still materialize new instance-level SKILL.md candidates, but Cortex does not overwrite existing skill source files.

• Evolution proposals instead of silent replacement

  • New candidates are linked to existing skills as new_pattern, improves, alternative_to, or candidate_replacement proposals.
  • Accepting a proposal marks the candidate healthy and deprecates the target without deleting the old source.
  • Rejecting a proposal preserves both sides and records the decision.

• Operator controls in the interactive CLI

  • /skill list shows loaded skills and health.
  • /skill proposals shows pending and historical evolution proposals.
  • /skill accept <id-or-prefix> and /skill reject <id-or-prefix> govern proposals from the CLI.

• Persistence and auditability

  • Skill health and evolution proposals are stored in the journal database and loaded on daemon start.
  • Proposal decisions emit journal events so lifecycle changes are inspectable alongside normal runtime events.
  • Proposal accept/reject RPC methods are restricted to the local operator identity.

• Documentation and SDK updates

  • README and usage guides now describe memory, metacognition, self-evolution, and skill lifecycle governance more accurately.
  • Chinese documentation typography was cleaned up for readability.
  • cortex-sdk metadata and examples were bumped to 1.6.11, and cortex-sdk 1.6.11 has been published to crates.io.

Upgrade Notes

• Existing instances migrate automatically when the journal opens; the new skill health and proposal tables are created if missing.
• Existing SKILL.md files are preserved. Cortex creates candidate skills only when the target file does not already exist.
• Quarantined and deprecated skills remain visible for inspection but are excluded from automatic agent activation.
• Operators can continue to install the binary with the release installer:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/by-scott/cortex/main/scripts/install.sh | bash -s -- --permission-level balanced

Verification

• ./scripts/build.sh
• cargo publish -p cortex-sdk --locked --dry-run
• cargo build --release --locked -p cortex-app --bin cortex
• Release archive check: root contains cortex, and the packaged binary reports cortex 1.6.11.