v7.0.1

Inherited rules and tooling are the CTO's to judge

• Rules, tools, and records that earlier sessions made are the CTO's own earlier decisions, including a technical option the owner picked from a list an agent offered; product choices stay the owner's however they were made. Only what the owner's own words require stays the owner's. Simplify no longer treats a rule as the owner's when its history is unclear, and commits under the owner's account do not make a rule theirs. Simplify keeps the intent the owner stated, such as small modules, and revises the mechanism an agent chose for it, such as a line limit with a baseline to maintain.
• A rule that forces needless work counts as a defect, and the kernel's reuse rule now applies before an agent repairs its own tooling as well as before it writes new tooling.
• Simplify judges the project's own tooling, gates, and limits by their cost per run and in fixes against what they catch and what the test runner, CI provider, linter, or a maintained library offers. The agents and CI jobs that run them do not count as the callers that justify them. A test cut that relies on other coverage holds only after that other test has been read.

Findings and loading survive the run

• When a lead accepts a delegate's return, it settles each finding: fixes it, folds it into planned work, records it with the reason it waits, or says why it is not a finding. Returns list findings apart from status. The kernel opens tracked-work for deferred findings, which says where the record goes and what it carries.
• Every workflow now loads the kernel by invoking the skiphow skill where the host has a skill tool, and otherwise by reading the file. A host that re-attaches invoked skills after compaction then keeps the kernel in context.

Why

A trace of 22 root sessions and their delegates that ran 7.0.0 on three owner projects found loading much improved, but also four failures. Three sessions lost a kernel they had read as a file at compaction. Leads never mentioned again 41% of the items their delegates raised. Agents kept an agent-chosen line limit and an agent-built test selector as owner decisions. Test deletions that claimed other coverage left holes that only review caught. See evidence and decisions.

Checks and evidence

• This is a patch release. It restores behavior 7.0.0 promised: revising agent-made rules, keeping the system small, and accounting for every finding. Authority and protected-action boundaries are unchanged, and product decisions stay the owner's.
• An isolated read-only Codex review ran three rounds. Round 1 found that the owner-pick clause in the kernel and simplify did not limit options to technical ones, so an agent could have revised a product choice the owner made from an agent's list. Both now say technical, and the docs match. Round 2 found that the new fixture claimed every direct fix changes the file's length, but a same-length fix exists. The fixture now says only a length-changing fix trips the budget, and the required revision does not depend on it. Round 3 found nothing that qualified.
• No paid model sessions or clean-install runs were made. The new behavior remains UNVERIFIED.

Release-runner validation matrix

Scope: this release runner. External candidate and model-session receipts are recorded separately.

Capability	Status	Detail
Deterministic package gate	PASS	scripts/check.py
Codex schema validation	PASS	validate_plugin.py
Claude schema validation	UNVERIFIED	Claude Code unavailable
Clean Codex install	UNVERIFIED	skipped
Clean Claude install	UNVERIFIED	skipped
Explicit invocation	UNVERIFIED	not run by the release runner; external model-session evidence is recorded separately
Implicit activation	UNVERIFIED	not run by the release runner; external model-session evidence is recorded separately
Continuity/bootstrap	UNVERIFIED	not run by the release runner; external model-session evidence is recorded separately
Behavioral contract suite	UNVERIFIED	never run or implied by CI; the versioned summary is docs/evidence.md