v0.11.0

The write path becomes append-only - incremental index folds, inline embed at ingest, and delta-only copy - and remote pond_search drops from ~8s to sub-second.

🛠 Breaking Changes

• Append-only write path. pond sync now embeds each message inline in its ingest commit, and both sync and copy fold the scalar indexes incrementally (optimize_indices(append)) instead of a full create_index(replace=true) rebuild - so the whole-source-column index rebuild that dominated each sync/copy tail (~520s on the real corpus) is gone. pond copy carries only absent-or-grown sessions and appends a grown session's delta rows through the shared ingest write path (append, not merge-insert), keeping remote copies bandwidth-bound rather than commit-latency-bound.

🚀 Performance

• search: warm remote pond_search drops from ~7.9s to sub-second (best 224ms) on the full S3 corpus (11,788 sessions / 2.14M messages). Two stages did work the query never needed. has_embeddings answered "does this store have embeddings?" with an IsNotNull(vector) scan of the entire vector column (6.8-11.7s per query); it now reads the manifest (index presence, ~0ms) and only falls back to a LIMIT 1 probe when no index exists. Per-hit part summaries fetched file blobs from S3 and scanned parts once per session sequentially; they now skip the blob (the label rides variant_data metadata) and run concurrently. The real retrieval - embed + IVF probe + hydrate - is ~0.1s.
• search (#75): from_date/to_date returned empty on remote stores because the messages_timestamp_zonemap mis-prunes the tz-aware timestamp column (ScalarValue::partial_cmp across the tz mismatch prunes every zone). The index is dropped and date bounds run as a refine over the candidate set. Stores that already built it: run pond optimize --drop-index messages_timestamp_zonemap once, or date filters stay empty there.

📚 Documentation

• add remote read-path cold-start plan and drop stale prewarm comment figures

🧹 Chores

• bench batch/commit sweeps, append-only write-path plan, AIMD hands-off rule
• enforce changelog header taxonomy (pre-commit + moon + CI); backfill 0.10.1/0.10.2

Full Changelog: v0.10.2...v0.11.0