v1.2.0 — Four lanes, named phases, re-engagement

Everything in this release came from running the library end to end on a live Apollo account rather than reading it. The previous audit was a full read of every skill and caught none of these. 17 skills.

The headline: there are four lanes, not three

apollo auth login stores an OAuth token, and that token authenticates against the same REST endpoint the MCP uses. So you get the complete MCP filter surface (NAICS, tenure, headcount growth, department headcounts) while writing results straight to disk — no API key needed. Verified against MCP on an identical query: same total, 3 MB to disk, nothing through the context window.

Lane	Auth	Results go	Best for
MCP	OAuth	Through context	Guardrailed, human-gated steps
CLI binary	apollo auth login	To disk	Bulk work, common filters
REST + the CLI's own token	Reuses the CLI's token	To disk	Bulk work needing advanced filters
REST + API key	API key	Anywhere	Building a separate service

Neither surface contains the other. Record collections, mailbox purchasing, and the Context Center are MCP-only. Deals, custom-field creation, rate-limit stats, and stopping a live sequence are REST/CLI only.

The rule it collapses to: search wide off-context, act narrow on MCP.

Added

• re-engagement — going back to the 90%+ of any list who finished a sequence and never replied. When it is safe (60-90 days), the permanent exclusions, and why "just following up" is not a reason.
• Operator voice — the communication standard, as prime directive 7. How the operator introduces itself, five named response shapes, a jargon gloss table, and ceremony matched to stakes. Written for someone who has never run outbound.
• The 85% rule — if a step would spend more than 85% of your remaining credits, it stops and offers you named choices instead of quoting a number.
• A required explanation gate before enrichment. Never hand over a free-stage list without saying what is missing and why.
• angles.md — running several angles against one ICP. Timing signals decay, technographic fit does not, structural facts never do.
• cli-recipes.md — verified commands, response-shape gotchas, credit table.
• Waterfall enrichment, phone reveal, Context Center, mailbox purchasing, per-contact merge personalization, website-visitor signals.

Changed

• Numbered levels replaced with named phases. Foundations → Context → Targeting → Infrastructure → List → Message → Launch → Iterate. Infrastructure moved ahead of List and Message because warmup is a 14-21 day wall-clock wait that must run in parallel.
• apollo-cli renamed apollo-operator, since Apollo now ships its own official skill under the old name. We reference theirs for command detail rather than duplicating it.
• The context-cost claim is now measured, and the obvious version was wrong: CLI and MCP return byte-identical payloads. The saving is preloaded tool schemas plus the ability to bypass context entirely.

Fixed

• Title filters silently over-match. founder also returns Founding Engineer, Founding Designer, Founding GTM — 9 to 14% of a raw list.
• Pagination overlaps. 3,238 rows contained 2,933 unique people. Per-company capping does not remove them, and you pay per duplicate.
• A data provider's catch-all flag is not a verification. One list reported clean on all 846 addresses; an independent verifier found 39% catch-all.
• MCP is the only lane that cannot stop a live send. Set up the CLI before you launch.
• people search -f csv is broken — the whole array lands in one cell.
• companies search splits results across .accounts and .organizations, ratio shifting by page.
• People search is free; company search costs 1 credit per call.
• Suppression now covers your other lists, not just the current one.

Full detail in CHANGELOG.md.

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