obot.agent v0.5.0 — the requirement-session core

See it move: Requirement Sessions: the Mid-October Plan — the operating model this release installs, and the five objectives it runs.

The autonomous prototype is retired. @jwildfire shut it down on 2026-09-10 after a readout that was hard to argue with: the agent structure held, and it spent its effort on itself — worker reporting, worktree hygiene, spend meters, dashboards — while no agent-made release ever reached him for review. This release removes that machinery and installs the replacement: requirement sessions that run in the cloud, one objective each, for as long as the objective takes.

What's new

• A session now starts from a requirement issue and ends when its tasks are closed and its definition of done is proven. The requirement-session skill reads the objective's tree, refuses to start until every node under the requirement has a definition of done and a milestone and the objective is signed off, turns the requirement's definition of done into a condition for Claude Code's built-in /goal, and reports the tasks' state at the end of every turn so the evaluator judges facts rather than silence. Contract: the hub's issue contract and ways of working.
• Progress is written where the work is. A session comments on its requirement at start, on each task as it closes with the evidence its definition of done asked for, nightly under three fixed headings — complete, in progress, blocked — and on the objective when the requirement closes. A blocked issue carries one question for @jwildfire in its latest comment; nothing else asks him anything.
• The standup reads GitHub and nothing else. routines/standup.md is the prompt for a scheduled cloud routine: every objective with its complete / in progress / blocked counts, then one question per blocked issue, published to the same voice-readable branch as before. No local state, no sweep, no session has to be alive for it.
• Sessions run in the cloud. Each requirement session is a Claude Code cloud session bound to its repository, in an environment whose setup script installs the toolchain once. Nothing runs on the Mac and nothing is bridged through Remote Control; steering happens on claude.ai/code or the phone. The three environments and their setup scripts are in docs/cloud-environments.md.
• Merging is GitHub's job. Rulesets replace the policy script: integration branches require green checks and merge automatically, release branches require an approving review from @jwildfire. A cloud session merges with a plain pull request; the ruleset spec and the command that applies it are in the hub's developer guidelines.
• The actor is the connected GitHub account. The obotclaw[bot] identity depended on a private key in one Mac's Keychain, which cannot travel to a cloud sandbox. Authorship is recorded where it always was — the drafted-by line at the foot of every issue, PR and comment, and the co-author trailer on every commit.

Retired in this release

The standards moved to the hub. Everything this repo used to say about how work is done — the release-candidate framework and release notes, testing expectations and the GxP stance, the interview framework, the renderer-migration playbooks and their templates — now lives in jwildfire/obot.roadmap under docs/, in more detail than it had here, alongside the new issue contract. This repo keeps only the core of the semi-autonomous approach and points at those standards as mandatory.

The navigator, admiral and prime sessions and their launchers; the --auto dispatcher and the objective registry; the session bookend skills (session-init through session-wrapup) with their scratchpad, journals, dashboards and /s-* aliases; the merge policy script, the branch-protection spec and the policy file; the App-token, push and merge wrappers; the spend cap; the stop hooks; the sibling briefings; the voice, fold, rank and session-hub tools; the session-framework, reachability, remote-control and spend-cap documents; and, with the standards' move to the hub, the remaining skills (chartjs-migration, renderer-modernization, requirements-harvesting, p004-*, gxp-test-framework, rc-release-notes, grill-me, stakeholder-interview, obot-identity), the framework docs, the templates, the P004 interview records, the wiki-harvest script and the drafts/ archive of posted bodies. The v0.4.0 tag and the git history are the archive.

The changes that landed on main after v0.4.0 and are retired here without a release of their own are kept on record in NEWS.md, under this section.