v2.7.0 — post-v2.6.0 hardening & the #203 audit-trail epic

[danielPoloWork]

v2.7.0 is a MINOR, additive release: it hardens the phase engine, the learning loop, the renderer's write path, and the self-lint, and completes the #203 audit-trail epic. It groups 13 merged PRs (#204–#218) across issues #194–#202 + the epic children #213/#214/#215. No breaking changes; a legacy manifest renders unchanged.

Added

• Phase-state transitions are enforced — a delivery-state-consistent check rejects phase-skips (workflow: phase-state advancement is honor-system — nothing verifies gates were green when delivery_state.phase changed #199). delivery_state.checkpoints must be a legal, contiguous chain ending at the current phase, with confirmed_by on human-gated moves; a hallucinating agent can no longer set phase: scaffold without the intervening checkpoints.
• Fail-closed phase gates under --strict; the dead --links plumbing dropped (tools: deterministic phase gates fail open — skipped never blocks and run_phase's --links is threaded but never read #200). Gate marks distinguish skipped (not applicable) from needs-input (a checkable input was withheld); --strict fails the phase on needs-input, so a gate can't be satisfied by omission.
• Interview provenance is enforced complete, not just well-shaped (interview: provenance completeness is not enforced — partial blocks silently starve the learning loop #201). Every answer-bearing section needs a provenance entry (+ questionnaire_version), so a partial block no longer silently starves the learning loop.
• The agent-registry self-lint is now bidirectional (lint: agent-registry check is one-way — a README link to a deleted persona stays green #202). A dead index link (a renamed/deleted persona) is caught, not just a missing persona.
• Live gate_results in a transition's checkpoint — the phase audit trail (audit: emit a phase-tagged action record for every phase (not just scaffold) — wire live gate_results into the #199 checkpoint #213). The checkpoint records the runner's own live evaluation of the deterministic gates, and — with at/confirmed_by — is the phase-tagged action record for every transition.
• Optimistic concurrency for the manifest — manifest_rev + --expect-rev (manifest: add optimistic concurrency (manifest_rev / content-hash) so parallel sessions can't silently lose updates #214). Parallel sessions can no longer silently lose an update; a stale write is refused with a CONFLICT.
• Learning-loop coverage (learning: refactor-phase failure channel, a documented autotune confidence floor, and override-value redaction #215). A refactor-phase --failure channel + phase-tagged records, a corpus-scaled autotune confidence floor, and redaction of sensitive override values.

Fixed

• yamlmini rejects folded > block scalars instead of silently dropping the body (tools: yamlmini silently drops folded (>) block-scalar bodies instead of rejecting them #194) — the fix also recovered the notes bodies in every language profile.
• A second same-day run record no longer requires falsifying its date (learning: a second same-day run can only be recorded by falsifying its date #197).
• The learning-loop miners skip a malformed record instead of aborting the analysis (learning: autotune and lesson_audit abort with a raw traceback on one malformed run record #198).

Security

• The renderer refuses to clobber pre-existing files — additive by default, --force to regenerate (render: --in-place clobbers pre-existing files in the target repo, contradicting the additive no-clobber posture #195).
• A .git path segment is rejected at validation time, not just at write time (render: write_file lacks the .git-at-any-depth refusal that sandbox.py enforces #196).

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Verified on main: 16 self-lint checks green (incl. version-lockstep + i18n-freshness), 44/44 test scripts pass. Full detail in CHANGELOG.md.

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This discussion was created from the release v2.7.0 — post-v2.6.0 hardening & the #203 audit-trail epic.