v0.5.6 — world-building as context engineering

v0.5.6 — world-building as context engineering

OpenRig 0.5.6 ships the context system's next layer, makes long-running
agents durable, and makes messages to humans trustworthy. Three themes: the
context a seat runs on is structured, tagged, and verifiable; an agent seat
can now outlive its own context window without a human managing the
transition; and anything routed to a human carries proof of delivery.

The context system: structured, tagged, verifiable

• The mission install. A documented five-layer convention
  (docs/reference/mission-install.md) for installing project context into a
  seat: the pieces, their arrangement, the seat's own position, the current
  contract, and a derive-your-own-delta step that proves the install was
  consumed rather than skimmed.
• Lore routing. What a seat learns locally routes into addressable,
  rig-local lore packs (docs/reference/lore-routing.md) — carried with a
  maturity stage from birth, and structurally excluded from anything that
  ships.
• Taxonomy everywhere. Every pack entering rig context carries its
  class — WORLD / LORE / SKILLS / MISSION — surfaced in listings, with a loud
  refusal for untagged packs.
• A public world pack with checkable claims. The public onboarding pack
  is authored as atoms whose claims each carry a check that can fail, with
  the verifier shipped inside the pack — public content that cannot rot
  silently.
• A complete, self-retrievable skill index. The skill router's index now
  covers the full shipped set, is retrievable through the routes it teaches,
  and carries a recurrence test so coverage gaps stay found.
• A substance gate for what ships. A whole-surface review pass over every
  packaged file (bundle and npm surfaces included) runs as a named release
  step; this release shipped with all 5,316 packaged files passing.

Continuity: seats that outlive their context windows

• Continuity policies in the agent spec. compaction_strategy is now live
  configuration with four modes: default-compaction, managed-compaction,
  handover, and apprentice-handover. Modes apply to Claude seats
  (positive runtime matching — Codex seats keep their native behavior) and
  resolve through the same spec-default < profile < member precedence as the
  rest of the agent spec.
• The apprentice handover, automated. A seat declaring
  apprentice-handover gets two armed triggers: near its context threshold,
  the system creates a fresh successor seat and runs its onboarding install;
  nearer the wall, it mints an owned handover work item for the seat that
  executes the swap. The executing seat is declared configuration (mechanic: on the
  policy) — never inferred from topology, and arming refuses loudly if it is
  missing.
• Managed compaction with honest restores. Seats in managed-compaction
  mode get a pre-compaction prep nudge (deposit your state before the window
  closes) and, after a configured restore, a durable receipt recording how
  much usable context the restore actually recovered — so a restore that
  silently refills the window instead of recovering width is visible.
• Context-usage triggers as a primitive. rig watchdog gains a
  usage-threshold condition: fire any command when a seat's context usage
  crosses a calibrated per-seat threshold. The continuity modes are built on
  it; your own automation can be too.

The human layer: delivery you can prove

• No more silent fall-through. One destination resolver classifies every
  dispatch: terminal-bound seats use the terminal; registered humans and
  virtual seats route through the gateway; nothing falls through to a
  terminal lookup that cannot succeed. Unregistered external addresses get a
  structured, teaching refusal.
• Delivery receipts on the work item. Every gateway post writes its
  receipt atomically on the queue row: posted (with the message timestamp
  and channel), transport-failed (with the error), or — derivably —
  never-posted. rig queue undelivered now consults that ledger first and
  returns only genuine failures. "Did this reach them?" is one read.
• Notification levels, one vocabulary. Queue transitions classify as
  RECORD < NOTICE < ALERT at write time — a human-required decision is
  ALERT; system ceremony events are NOTICE; the rest is durable record.
  Two independent dials configure the minimum level that posts and the
  minimum level that interrupts.
• A delivery-rules engine. Stored per-human preferences and availability
  decide how each message class is delivered. An off preference suppresses
  interruption — never the durable record, the post, or the receipt. Away
  windows defer routine traffic into digests (4-hour and daily), with
  exactly-once delivery by construction: durable episode identities, retry
  until a real receipt, and structurally non-overlapping digests.
• Files dropped in Slack become work. A file or image upload lands as a
  work item with the file transferred to local storage and referenced by
  path — authenticated download, size-bounded, per-file failures named, and
  no URL or token ever written to a row. A park blocked on a registered human
  automatically enters the alert path and posts exactly once per episode.

Operational honesty

• A rate-limited seat gets exactly one timed wake at its stated reset.
• A seat holding claimed live work while sitting idle gets woken by the
  system, consuming the arbitrated activity oracle — with exactly one wake
  per park episode.
• Refocus state keys to the current occupant of a seat; a fresh occupant
  never inherits a predecessor's baselines.
• rig ps counts claimed in-progress work as assigned work.
• Sends refuse empty bodies; unknown daemon API routes return JSON 404s.
• Stuck-sweep findings stop re-minting after closure; cross-host custody
  verification completes durably instead of refreshing forever.
• Blocker actuation is unified: one helper, cross-host closure honest,
  delivery after the transaction commits.
• Rig expansion and serialization preserve what they were given:
  session_source versions, services, and member overrides survive
  round-trips; fork forwards model, role, restore policy, and label.
• rig view show execution derives who is building what, what is next, and
  each item's completion rung (locked / built / reviewed / folded / adopted)
  at read time — unknowns render as INDETERMINATE, never as idle or done.

Process and reference

• The SDLC conventions document is now a component menu: choose per mission
  from the simple flow, the wave model, or the rigorous overlay, with
  planning rigor as a dial. Four full references ship at docs/reference/:
  planning-dial.md, wave-sdlc.md, release-boundary.md, and
  product-management-pass.md, joined by mission-install.md and
  lore-routing.md.

Upgrade notes

• Three database migrations apply automatically on daemon start:
  074_context_usage_watchdog, 075_context_usage_watchdog_generation, and
  076_owner_notification_levels. No manual steps.
• Context packs: 41 ship (up from 39).
• Delivery defaults are deliberately wide open (post at NOTICE and above,
  interrupt at ALERT and above). Tune down from measured volume with the
  two dials rather than pre-filtering.
• Continuity modes are opt-in per seat; unconfigured seats keep today's
  behavior exactly.