Milestone: v0.75 alpha — friends-and-family testing on published channels

[tig]

Tracks the v0.75 alpha-test milestone in specs/clet-spec.md §7. This is the friends-and-family milestone — first time clet leaves the maintainer's machine and lands on real users' terminals via the published channels, before the v0.9 RC gates harden things for a wider audience.

The intent: surface the bugs that only show up when somebody else is driving. Press release language ("feels inline", "JSON contract trustworthy", "AI agents can rely on it") gets tested against actual humans and actual agents, not just CI.

Milestone names ≠ version numbers. "v0.75" is a project-tracking label. The actual version clet --version reports is whatever TG dispatched (Terminal.Gui.clet 2.0.2-develop.NN today; 2.x.y once TG cuts a release tag). Per D-020, the published version is always the dispatched TG version. There is no clet 0.75.0 package.

Exit criteria — distribution

• At least 5 external testers have installed and run clet from a published channel (NuGet stable, NuGet prerelease, or Homebrew once it's wired beyond the placeholder). Tester list tracked privately; only count people who actually ran a non-trivial flow at least once. (0 / 5 — needs non-maintainer machines.)
• At least 2 of the 4 target terminals (§6.5 — macOS Terminal, iTerm2, Windows Terminal, GNOME Terminal) have been driven by someone other than the maintainer. Aim for 3+, but don't gate on 4 — friends and family don't always cover every OS.
• Both install paths work end-to-end against the public NuGet feed. dotnet tool install -g Terminal.Gui.clet (stable) and dotnet tool install -g Terminal.Gui.clet --prerelease (develop, e.g. 2.0.2-develop.35) both verified resolving from https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json. Still needed: at least one non-maintainer running each path on their own machine — that's the criterion above.

Exit criteria — feedback loop

• README points testers at the GitHub Issues tracker as the alpha-feedback channel. No Discussions, no separate forum — Issues is the single channel during alpha. The Alpha feedback section in the README spells out what to include (clet version, terminal + OS, what they did vs. what happened).
• At least 3 alpha-feedback Issues filed (by people who aren't the maintainer). Zero issues from external testers is a signal nobody actually used it, not a signal it's perfect. (0 / 3.)
• All P0 issues from alpha feedback resolved or explicitly deferred to v0.9 with a written rationale. P1/P2 may carry into v0.9.
• One end-of-alpha summary posted as a closing comment on this issue: how many testers, headline issues found, what's changing for v0.9, what's locked.

Exit criteria — dogfooding

• Maintainer has used clet (not dotnet run) in their own real workflows — shell scripts, AI agent loops, anything that isn't a clet test — for at least 2 days. Eat the dogfood; don't ship the dogfood you didn't eat.
• At least one AI agent harness has consumed clet --json output for a non-toy task. Could be gui-cs/ai, could be something else; the test is "did --json actually flow through a tool-use loop without manual cleanup."

What v0.75 is not

• Not v0.9 RC. The four-terminal manual matrix (#23) does not need to be 100% green to ship v0.75; v0.75 is the input to that matrix run. Same for the §5.3 smoke gate full-coverage criterion and the rollback runbook exercise — those are v0.9.
• Not feature-complete past v0.5 lock. No new clets land between v0.5 and v0.75 unless a P0 alpha bug demands one. Surface area is what's locked in v0.5 (D-020 etc.).
• Not a public launch. No HN post, no blog post, no gh release with a "1.0!" feel. Friends and family means friends and family — invite-only, expectation-managed.

Cross-references

• Predecessor milestone: #4 v0.5 beta — must be fully done before v0.75 opens.
• Successor milestone: #5 v0.9 RC — alpha-test feedback feeds into v0.9 exit criteria.
• Spec §7 milestone table and §10 implementation order define the milestone formally.
• Cross-terminal matrix: #23 (a v0.75 input, a v0.9 exit criterion).
• Continuous-release loop powering the alpha install paths: D-020.