ginee v0.21.0

Highlights

• Sub-issue pickup is cheaper (#152). Picking up a sub-issue with a ginee:role:* label + dispatch-contract body dispatches the named cardinal directly. Saves one full @team-lead re-derive (~15–40k tokens) per sub-issue pickup.
• Trivial scope skips Phase 1–3 (#153). New lite: (alias direct:) prefix elides requirements / design / design-review for typos, single-label tweaks, and single-doc-bullet edits. Phase 4 dispatches one named cardinal directly; Phase 7 + Phase 8 still run. CR / ADR gates stay in effect — lite is orchestration cost, not governance bypass. Composes with every other prefix (auto: lite:, branch: lite:, etc.).
• Heavy roles run on demand across Phase 4–7 (#162). team-lead + solution-architect are invocation-gated, not phase-gated — default is skip unless an affirmative trigger fires (sub-issue routing artefact · SA-owned-file edit · NFR-oracle red · ## Open issues / ## Hand-off / Status: In-progress on cardinal return · cross-domain bug · multi-cardinal PR). Phases 1 / 2 / 3 / 8 (team-lead) and 1 / 2 / 7 (SA) stay load-bearing.
• QA pixel-check — mockup becomes a runtime oracle (#163). Optional Phase 5 stage diffs the rendered app against the mockup at a shared seed-state. Catches CSS regressions, layout shifts, missing icons, broken responsive breakpoints — failures behaviour tests + manual smoke miss today. Off by default; opt in via qa.pixel-check.enabled: true. Adopter picks alignment direction (mockup-follows-seed or seed-follows-mockup).

Adopter migration

Mostly nothing to do. The four features are either purely additive or opt-in.

Per-change action

Change	Action
Sub-issue pickup fast-path	None — ginee-pick-up detects the routing artefact and uses it automatically
Lite mode prefix	None — prefix lite: / direct: on any task to use it; otherwise default Phase 1–8
Heavy-role bypass codification	None — codifies an existing principle. Cardinals continue to fill ## Open issues / ## Hand-off / Status fields per phase-report schema; those fields are now the binding re-entry signal
QA pixel-check	Opt in. Set qa.pixel-check.enabled: true in local/framework.config.yaml + populate seed-script.path · mockup-snapshot.path · app-render.command in local/bindings.md. Run the tolerance-bootstrap recipe in the migration to establish baseline masks

Notes

• Heavy-role bypass is enforcement + observability, not new mechanics. Half the rules already existed in fragmented form (SA "governance dip" qualifiers in phase-4/5/6.md, "Review on architectural fix" in phase-6.md, sub-issue pickup fast-path from #152). The shared protocol consolidates them and adds transcript-grep recipes for spotting defensive dispatch.
• Pixel-check pairs with blueprint-diff-protocol.md — blueprint-diff catches mockup self-drift; pixel-check catches app-vs-mockup drift. Both run only on changes touching the visual surface.
• Team-lead headroom drops to ~19% (vs ~23% in 0.20.0). Driven by lite-mode + heavy-role-bypass citation blocks; still within the 90,000-byte ceiling. Watch in 0.22.0 — next dispatch.md-touching change may warrant an ai-engineer pass.

Migration files

• migrations/sub-issue-fast-path.md
• migrations/lite-mode.md
• migrations/heavy-role-bypass.md
• migrations/qa-pixel-check.md

Browse: github.com/kostiantyn-matsebora/ginee/tree/v0.21.0/migrations/.