v0.4.0

debug-recovery

This release adds debug-recovery, vibekit's pipeline failure branch and a standalone debugging skill. It brings the plugin to 15 skills (14 invocable + the auto-loaded using-vibekit priming layer).

Until now the vibe pipeline modelled only the happy path — brainstorm → plan → isolate → exec → verify → review → integrate. There was no disciplined response for when something fails. debug-recovery fills that gap: it stops the line, proves a root cause from verbatim evidence, and routes the fix back through the existing gates without ever editing code itself.

New skill: debug-recovery

Triggers

• Pipeline failure branch — fires when verify-gate returns not satisfied/partial, or an exec-dispatch task fails its test/build.
• Standalone — fires when you report a bug, a failing test, a broken build, or ask "why is this failing" outside a vibe run.
• Precedence — it fires after a gate has already produced a failure; it consumes that failure and never pre-empts a passing verify-gate.

The 8-step stop-the-line procedure

1. STOP — no new features, no speculative edits.
2. PRESERVE — capture the error/log/repro verbatim (never-compress).
3. REPRODUCE — make the failure reliable; otherwise document conditions.
4. ISOLATE — binary-search the diff/history to the smallest culprit.
5. HYPOTHESIZE — state the root cause as a falsifiable claim with evidence.
6. CONFIRM — dispatch exactly one fresh, read-only subagent that tries to refute the root cause (bounded to 3 re-hypothesis cycles, then escalate).
7. ROUTE — small fix → exec-dispatch; structural fix → plan-write.
8. GUARD — the routed fix must carry a regression test that fails pre-fix.

Design guarantees

• Never edits code. Diagnosis is the product; the fix flows through the existing gates, preserving the "no code without a brief/plan" discipline on the unhappy path too.
• Evidence before diagnosis. No root cause is asserted without a quotable artifact; error messages, stack traces, test output, diff hunks, and the confirmation verdict are never compressed.
• Single fresh-context confirmation, mirroring exec-dispatch's read-only plan-compliance reviewer — no new heavyweight adversarial machinery.
• Cross-runtime capability gate. Requires one fresh-context subagent dispatch; on Gemini/Pi it degrades to in-session self-refutation with a verbatim degradation warning, never a silent skip.
• Structured diagnosis report (status, failure, reproduction, root_cause, evidence, confirmation, fix_route, guard_test) returned through report-filter in-pipeline or surfaced to the user standalone.

Cross-runtime registration

• skills/debug-recovery/SKILL.md — new canonical source (one source, five delivery paths).
• skills/using-vibekit/SKILL.md — two new auto-trigger-map rows (failure branch + standalone).
• AGENTS.md — skill-table row; plugin count bumped 14 → 15.
• GEMINI.md — @-include for the new skill.
• Manifests auto-discover via the skills/ glob; the 7-stage pipeline descriptions are intentionally unchanged (debug-recovery is off-pipeline).

Versioning

• All runtime manifests aligned to 0.4.0, fixing pre-existing drift (manifests were at 0.3.2, marketplace at 0.3.0, npm package at 0.3.3).

Validation

• verify-gate: ready — every requirement satisfied with verbatim evidence; surgical-diff blast-radius audit returned clean (zero orphans).
• review-pack: 0 blocks, signed off.
• Live eval: PASS (happy path) — driven against a real planted bug, the skill walked all 8 steps, performed a genuine fresh-context confirmation dispatch, routed to exec-dispatch with a guard test, and left the code untouched. The Gemini/Pi degraded fallback is statically verified (warning text + fallback present); a live run on those hosts remains an open follow-up.

Upgrade notes

• After updating, refresh the installed plugin cache so vibekit:debug-recovery becomes invocable via the Skill tool.

Full changelog: v0.3.3...v0.4.0