Orca v0.2.52

Orca v0.2.52

Orca v0.2.52 fixes a continuation boundary that could stop a persistent Goal
even though the model had only reached its inner-turn limit. Turn completion
now preserves whether work advanced, was interrupted at a resumable boundary,
or requires human or external intervention.

What Changed

• Goal continuation now uses a typed disposition:
  Advanced, Interrupted, or Blocked. MaxInnerTurns is a resumable
  interruption; cost-budget exhaustion, cancellation, approval, verification
  failure, and other blocking outcomes still pause.
• Agent-loop results preserve a typed end reason through the controller,
  thread, and RuntimeHost boundaries. The continuation gate no longer has to
  infer semantics from a lossy success boolean.
• Budget soft-landing reminders are injected before inner-turn, cost, and Goal
  token limits are exhausted. They ask the model to finish the current atomic
  step, update the task plan, and record findings at a clean handoff point.
• Every automatic continuation receives a structured handoff containing the
  objective, continuation trigger, previous status and end reason, token
  budget, open gap, current task plan, and a bounded assistant checkpoint. The
  next turn is told to resume from that state and verify the current worktree
  instead of restarting repository exploration.
• Progress detection is now independent from continuation admission. Completed
  mutating tools and structured plan changes count as substantive progress;
  read-only exploration and model chatter do not.
• SQLite recovery preserves productive-turn barriers, so identical gaps on
  opposite sides of real progress are not joined into one false streak.
• The watchdog pauses after three repeated model-fixable gaps and separately
  caps eight consecutive MaxInnerTurns interruptions.

Compatibility

No CLI, TUI, configuration, or SQLite schema migration is required. Existing
Goal state and turn history remain readable.

The behavior change is intentionally narrow: reaching the inner-turn limit can
now continue automatically. Cost-budget exhaustion, cancellation, approval
requirements, verifier failure, user control, pending interaction, and
workflow ownership remain stopping boundaries.

Verification

• complete serial Rust workspace test suite
• 946 orca-runtime unit tests and all runtime integration suites
• Rust formatting and workspace clippy
• npm staging and published-package verifier self-tests
• website production build and SEO checks
• public GitHub Release, npm package, platform aliases, and npm exec smoke
  verification

Install

npm install -g @blade-ai/orca@0.2.52

Or install a native release asset:

curl -fsSL https://orcaagent.dev/install.sh | \
  INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/bin ORCA_VERSION=0.2.52 sh