v5.21.1

A project can be held open per consumer, without the process-global handle deciding for
everyone. initDb writes to one module-level context and getDb/getClient read it, so two
projects open at once in one process silently share the last one opened: reproduced by opening A
then B and issuing a write through the caller that held A, which landed in B's file — A's store
empty, B's holding A's row, no error and no log line. closeDb is the other half, because it
releases the whole pool, so the first consumer to finish tore down every other one's connection
and the survivors got Database has not been initialized from a call they had made correctly.

No shipped consumer is affected, and this is hardening rather than a bugfix. Every one of
them opens exactly one project per process — the CLI is one-shot, and the MCP server binds a
project at startup and hops namespaces with withDbPath, which has been scoped since 3.0.1. The
subprocess boundary has been hiding the defect; the in-process library export planned for the
OpenClaw plugin removes it, because a long-running gateway holds several workspaces open in one
address space.

openProjectScope(root) returns a handle whose run(body) executes inside the same
AsyncLocalStorage the namespace hop already uses, so ambient reads resolve to that project
rather than to whoever opened last, and whose release() maps to releaseClient — one database,
leaving the pool alone. withProjectScope(root, body) is the open-run-release form. Two handles
on one project are refcounted, and a database the process-wide context is also using is never
released by a scope. Nothing assigns the global handle, so initDb/closeDb and every existing
call site behave exactly as before.

A Hermes session with Knowl selected as the memory provider gets its own card back. Selecting
Knowl in Settings > Memory & Context replaced the orientation card with keyword search over the
user's literal sentence: pre_llm_call returned nothing when memory.provider was knowl, and
the provider's prefetch ran knowl query <the prompt> --limit 5 on every turn instead. Recall
is the hook's job again on every host, whatever the dropdown says. system_prompt_block went with
it — register already publishes the rules section, and both halves loaded on such a session, so
the rules were in the system prompt twice.