v2026.8.20

AIWG 2026.8.20 - Portable missions, verified storage migrations

Release date: 2026-08-24
Channel: stable

AIWG 2026.8.20 strengthens two boundaries that become important as projects
grow beyond one process: how missions move between execution surfaces, and how
storage moves between backends without losing identity or silently overstating
capabilities. It also introduces an experimental Universal Harness Protocol
client for portable harness operations and hardens SQLite as the supported
same-host graph tier.

The common theme is evidence. A backend name no longer implies consistency or
durability, a copied pathname is no longer enough to prove migration, and a
mission payload cannot drift invisibly between CLI, Cockpit, Flow, and storage
consumers.

What this changes for you

Missions have one explicit protocol boundary

The versioned Mission contract now has a generated inventory, schema baseline,
consumer matrix, codecs, and migration tooling. This makes it possible to see
which consumers accept a contract version and to migrate older payloads before
they reach an execution boundary.

Mission backend routing is reversible and recorded. Operators can preview a
migration, apply it, verify the result, switch routing, and roll back rather
than changing a provider setting without durable evidence.

Use the focused gate while developing Mission consumers:

npm run test:mission-protocol

Experimental UHP clients can discover and run harnesses

The new UHP client implements the versioned 2026-08-11 transport for harness
and model discovery, request/response and event-stream execution, cancellation,
continuation, and file exchange. Configuration rejects unsafe remote transport
defaults, structured errors preserve protocol detail, and Cockpit can project
the normalized mission state.

Start with the offline conformance suite:

npm run test:uhp:offline

UHP remains experimental. A green fake-server suite proves the client contract;
it does not certify an arbitrary third-party harness deployment.

Storage migrations are revision- and checksum-backed

The new scalable storage contract declares what each backend has actually
demonstrated: read behavior, atomic batches, snapshots, cursors, tombstones,
idempotency, query operations, durability, isolation, and maturity. Capability
negotiation fails closed instead of inferring guarantees from a backend name.

The aiwg.storage-migration/v1 coordinator records source and destination
identity, schema, snapshot/cursor, revisions, content digests, tombstones,
destination receipts, and approval state. It supports bounded copy and replay,
exact resume, parity negatives, digest-bound cutover, and rollback windows.

The currently shipped pathname-oriented aiwg storage migrate command remains
the legacy offline path and is documented as such. The scalable coordinator is
not yet wired into that CLI command, and local protocol tests do not constitute
live Fortemi, PostgreSQL, or MySQL certification.

Run the common local correctness gate with:

npm run test:conformance:storage

SQLite is a stronger same-host graph tier

SQLite graph storage now verifies a safe WAL engine line, applies transactional
schema migration, exposes typed query columns, uses native SQL set operations
and bounded recursive traversal, reconciles stale nodes and edges atomically,
and reports bounded lock exhaustion explicitly. Checkpoint metrics and online
backup support operational qualification, while multi-process tests cover
same-key races and committed WAL reopen behavior.

Run the reference-host benchmark before setting a local support envelope:

npm run benchmark:index:sqlite

The benchmark is evidence for the machine and workload that produced it, not a
universal capacity claim.

Composition cycles fail closed

Composition graphs can now express guarded human-decision cycles only when
progress strictly decreases and a hard iteration limit exists. Approval nodes
pause and resume from checkpoints, and reports expose normalized scope,
duplicate suppression, and branch/join resource evidence. Benchmark claims
must survive a deliberately wrong negative-control policy.

Package matrix

aiwg@2026.8.20
@aiwg/cli@2026.8.20
@aiwg/cockpit@2026.8.20

Upgrade

Upgrade the package set together, regenerate provider context, and rebuild
indexes whose backend configuration changed:

npm install --global aiwg@2026.8.20
npm install --global @aiwg/cli@2026.8.20
npm install --global @aiwg/cockpit@2026.8.20
aiwg regenerate
aiwg index build

Rollback

Roll all three packages back together to 2026.8.19, then run
aiwg regenerate. Mission and UHP artifacts created under the new versioned
contracts should be retained for diagnosis; use the supplied migration and
contract-diff tooling before presenting them to an older consumer. SQLite
indexes remain regenerable from canonical sources and can be rebuilt after a
rollback.

Release boundaries

• Fortemi Server remains alpha until its updated server and shared-server
  qualification run are available.
• PostgreSQL and MySQL engine smoke tests are environment evidence only; their
  AIWG adapters remain unimplemented or deferred.
• The scalable migration coordinator is available as a library contract but is
  not yet the implementation behind the legacy storage migration CLI.