v0.8.0 — Web-grounding quality

ShellPilot v0.8.0 — Web-grounding quality for small local models

This release helps a small local model (default gemma4:e4b) verify web claims from sources instead of guessing from search snippets — entirely through deterministic harness guidance, with no backend change.

What changed

• web-grounding skill — standing grounding guidance. Treat search snippets as leads, not evidence: fetch the official source with web_fetch before asserting a factual, current, or numeric claim. Decompose multi-entity or comparison questions into separate searches. Discover-first query shaping (lead with authority terms like official / documentation / latest release; prefer a specific page over a homepage). Cite sources.
• Provider-neutral web_search description with a web_fetch bridge. The tool no longer names a specific search engine; it frames results as leads and points the model to web_fetch on the most authoritative result to ground an answer.
• Actionable web_fetch truncation marker. When a page is capped, the marker now suggests fetching a more specific source instead of guessing from a partial page. The fetch character limit is unchanged.

Not in this release

No provider/backend change — DuckDuckGo remains the keyless, zero-config default. A configurable privacy-first search provider (self-hosted SearXNG behind a seam) is planned for v0.8.5.

Validation

Verified live on gemma4:e4b: bare prompts now search, fetch the official source, and cite it unprompted, and decompose multi-entity comparisons into per-entity searches. 876 tests; CI green on Python 3.11 and 3.14.