v0.2.1

The session budget stops being decorative. Everything below was already configurable, already
documented and already wired to a surface; none of it could change what a run spent. Two live runs
on one machine spent roughly $200 in a night with maxSessionTokens set, because every rail between
that number and the agent was open at one end.

Fixed

• A plan edit now applies by itself. limits were only re-read on an explicit
  conductor plan reload, and nothing said so: the file could read maxSessionTokens: 6000000
  while the engine ran the plan it had loaded hours earlier, and the operator would watch sessions
  sail past a ceiling they had already set. The plan file is stamped when loaded and re-applied at
  the next session boundary when it changes. The reload line now names the budget it just put into
  force, so an edit that took hold says so.
• The per-session token ceiling ends the session. The check ran only after the agent exited,
  which made it a label rather than a limit — a session ran its full length and was then noted as
  having been over budget the whole time. It is now enforced live. This is the change that matters
  most for spend: a session is billed roughly turns × context and context only grows, so the last
  stretch of a long session costs several times the first, and that is exactly the part a ceiling
  has to be able to cut. Measured here, splitting one 164-turn session into three cuts its bill by
  about half for the same work.
• A budget-killed session reports what it cost. It emits no result envelope, so the one session
  the rail acts on was the one session reporting $0 — the ledger read as though stopping early were
  free. It is now priced at the run's own observed dollars-per-token, or left blank when no rate
  has been learned yet.
• The run-level token total counts cache reads. It summed input, output and reasoning while the
  per-session total also counted cache, so the two disagreed by roughly forty times on real work: a
  run that had read 79M tokens reported 2.9M. Every surface fed from it — the ledger, the report,
  doctor's headroom, and limits.maxRunTokens — inherited that, which put a run cap set from
  observed numbers permanently out of reach. Runs carried over from an older engine step up once.

Added

• The cooperative soft-break reaches the agent. It was written as: spend most of the budget,
  then be asked to land the current sub-task and hand off cleanly. Half of it was missing. The
  engine wrote .conductor/soft-break and emitted an event, and nothing carried either to the
  agent — a non-interactive session has no inbox and was never told the file existed — so the nudge
  fired into a void every time and the only rail that could still act was the hard one, which is a
  kill. A per-session --settings file now attaches a PostToolUse hook (conductor hook-budget,
  hidden) that speaks once, when and only when the signal is up, riding a tool call the session was
  making anyway.
• Sessions are told what they may spend. When a plan sets a per-session ceiling, the prompt
  carries the budget, the arithmetic behind it (turns × context, context only grows) and the few
  habits that actually move the number: commit early and often, read the sections a checkpoint
  names rather than whole design documents, never re-read what is already in context. It names the
  opposite failure too — a session that reads a few files, declares the problem complex and exits
  without landing anything has spent its whole context and delivered nothing.

Install

Download the archive for your platform, unpack it, and put the two binaries somewhere on
your PATH. They belong next to each other — the engine finds the Face by looking
beside itself.

Then, to see it work without credentials or spend:

conductor demo

Confirm what you unpacked with conductor version — it answers with this release's tag,
the commit it was built from, and the build date.

No .NET or Go install is needed: the engine is self-contained and the Face is a static
Go binary.

macOS: these binaries are not signed or notarised. On first run:
xattr -d com.apple.quarantine conductor conductor-face

Building from source instead: tools/install.sh (macOS/Linux) or
tools\install.ps1 (Windows).

Full Changelog: v0.2.0...v0.2.1