v3.14.0

Stage update 2026-10-15: The Forge plugin and orchestrator are in alpha. On 2026-10-15 (UTC) a separate NXTG.AI team (product-oracle) ran the pre-registered core-job test on a clean install of the plugin (v3.14.0) and the orchestrator (forge 1.7.0). The test passed; each repeated check passed 3 of 3 (run 7). The evidence is attached to the forge-plugin v3.14.0 release. No SLA; interfaces may change without notice.

Superseded 2026-10-15: Stage: Public preview. Forge is public: anyone may install and use it. Its maturity is below alpha (pre-alpha): no SLA, and interfaces may change without notice.

[3.14.0] — 2026-10-14

MINOR. The orchestrator moves to an optional companion plugin, nxtg-forge-orchestrator, so nxtg-forge alone registers no orchestrator-mcp (C1 as registered). /nxtg-forge:feature creates its task through MCP with forge_create_task (C7 as registered). Semgrep MCP no longer shows as failed when the published package crashes. Plus the hardening from the codex review of v3.13.1 and the re-landed status order (#82). Breaking: the orchestrator tools' full names change, and forge_open_dashboard honours BROWSER again (3.13.1 had dropped it).

Changed (breaking for anyone who calls orchestrator tools by full name)

• orchestrator-mcp moves to a companion plugin, nxtg-forge-orchestrator, in the same marketplace (DIRECTIVE-NXTG-20261014-12, EMMA-SOUL design C). nxtg-forge no longer registers it, so a user without the Forge orchestrator sees no orchestrator-mcp entry at all, rather than a connected stand-in. The companion carries today's launcher unchanged: forge mcp when the forge binary is found, the stand-in that names the installer when it is not (never a failed server), and FORGE_PROJECT_ROOT=${CLAUDE_PROJECT_DIR}. Its find-forge.sh and stand-in are byte copies of nxtg-forge's, and a test keeps them equal. install.sh (forge-orchestrator) installs the companion when it finds the claude CLI.
• The orchestrator now binds the Forge project when a session starts in a subdirectory. Claude Code passes the directory the session started in, and forge mcp does not walk up, so a session started in <project>/src got "Forge is not initialized" (true of every release so far). The companion's launcher binds the nearest ancestor holding .forge/state.json. It never goes above $HOME, so forge-ui's global ~/.forge never counts; both paths are resolved first, so a relative value, a trailing slash or a symlinked $HOME cannot make the walk loop or pass $HOME. With no Forge project above, the session directory is used as before. As a result, the companion's start.sh is no longer a byte copy of nxtg-forge's; find-forge.sh and the stand-in still are.
• The companion warns when the installed nxtg-forge is a release that still registers orchestrator-mcp (3.13.1 and earlier, kept until claude plugin update). Measured: with both installed, the session lists two connected orchestrator-mcp servers, so every orchestrator tool appears twice. Once per session, the companion's hook names claude plugin update nxtg-forge@nxtg-forge.
• Only NXTG forge is launched as the orchestrator. find-forge.sh (both plugins, and so the session hint and feature-task.sh) now accepts a forge only if its --version reads forge X.Y.Z, as every NXTG forge release does. The probe is bounded to 2 s (background and poll, so it also works with macOS's bash 3.2 and no timeout), and a candidate that is slower counts as not NXTG forge. Other programs named forge, such as Atlassian's and Laravel's CLIs, used to be run as forge mcp, fail, and show as a failed server cached for 15 minutes. Now the search continues past them, and if no NXTG forge is found the stand-in names the other program and the fix, including FORGE_BIN.
• The orchestrator tools' full names change from mcp__plugin_nxtg-forge_orchestrator-mcp__* to mcp__plugin_nxtg-forge-orchestrator_orchestrator-mcp__*. Nothing in the plugin names them in full: the commands use the short names, and the /nxtg-forge:feature Stop gate matches the suffix.
• The session hook still tells Claude, once per session, that the orchestrator is optional and the one command that adds it. With forge absent: curl -fsSL https://forge.nxtg.ai/install.sh | sh. With forge installed but the companion not: claude plugin install nxtg-forge-orchestrator@nxtg-forge. With both: nothing. The hook reads Claude Code's installed_plugins.json. It is printed even with FORGE_QUIET_HOOKS=1: it is one line of context Claude needs in every session, not progress output.

Fixed

• semgrep-mcp no longer shows as a failed server when uv is installed (DIRECTIVE-NXTG-20261014-11 part 4).
  • The published semgrep-mcp (0.9.0) exits 1 at import (ImportError: cannot import name 'eval_type_backport' from pydantic) before it answers, so exec uvx semgrep-mcp left Claude Code with "MCP server failed", cached for 15 minutes.
  • servers/semgrep-mcp/start.sh now runs the upstream behind a pure-bash guard. It buffers what the client sends and forwards it. If the upstream exits before its first stdout line, the buffer is replayed to the stand-in, which answers with no tools and says how to see the error (uvx --refresh semgrep-mcp). Once the upstream has answered, both directions are relayed unchanged. The same guard covers a semgrep-mcp on the PATH.
  • The guard is written for bash 3.2, the stock macOS /bin/bash that .mcp.json's plain bash runs: no coproc, no {fd} allocation, no fractional read -t. Its parts signal each other, and the session runs as its own process group. Checked under the official bash:3.2 image and bash 5.1.
  • SIGTERM to the launcher ends it and every process under it, both while relaying a running upstream and while the stand-in serves (PR #92 review M-1).
  • No version pin ships: --with 'pydantic<2.12' gets past the import, but the server then exits in its startup unless a semgrep CLI is on the PATH.

Hardening from the codex review of v3.13.1 (eb5499d), DIRECTIVE-NXTG-20261014-09

Fixed

• tools/call validates its params before any tool runs (M1). v3.13.0 got this from the MCP SDK; v3.13.1's own loop checked only the tool name, so "arguments": "invalid" ran the project's tests and forge_open_dashboard wrote a dashboard file. params must be an object, name a string, and arguments an object or absent; anything else (a string, an array, null, a number) gets JSON-RPC error -32602 and no tool runs.
• A frame that is not JSON-RPC 2.0 is rejected (L2). A message without "jsonrpc": "2.0" (missing, or "1.0") gets -32600 Invalid Request and is never dispatched; v3.13.1 ran it.
• forge_open_dashboard honours BROWSER again (M2). v3.13.1 replaced the open package, whose bundled xdg-open read BROWSER, with the system opener, so a Linux machine with BROWSER set and no xdg-open stopped opening the dashboard. The order is now: BROWSER (entries separated by :, %s replaced by the file path or the path appended, run without a shell), then the system opener (xdg-open, open, start; skipped on WSL), then on WSL PowerShell and wslview, then the path hint.

Changed

• /nxtg-forge:feature creates its orchestrator task through MCP (DIRECTIVE-NXTG-20261014-11 part 3, C7 as registered). Step 4.2 calls forge_create_task (forge 1.7.0 and later) with the feature title and description, then claims the returned task_id. The feature-task.sh helper (forge plan --generate --spec) is used only when that tool is not available. If the tool returns an error or no task_id, Step 4.2 falls back to the helper. The feature Stop gate takes the task id from the forge_create_task result, counts an errored or id-less create as no task, and its "no task" message names the MCP tool first.
• start.sh starts Node once (L1). It no longer runs a separate node -p process.versions.node before the server; index.mjs checks the version itself and, on a Node older than 20, hands stdin/stdout to the same no-tools stand-in, so the handshake still completes and nothing is cached as a failed start. Measured on this host, fresh bash start.sh to the initialize reply, n=15 each: unloaded p50 41.9 → 27.0 ms; with taskset -c 0,1 and 8 busy processes on those cores, p50 235.8 → 120.8 ms. Real Node 18.20.8 gets the stand-in (exit 0, 0 tools); Node 20.10.0 gets all 8 tools.

Tests

• New: malformed arguments (string, array, null, number) are rejected with no trace of forge_run_tests or forge_open_dashboard having run, with a valid call as the positive control; non-2.0 frames, in process and through start.sh; BROWSER parsing, order and fall-through, plus a real BROWSER program receiving the path; one Node start per launch on Node 20+ and the old-Node stand-in decided inside that one process.
• vitest 326 → 344.