v13.12.2 — The Merge Sweep

v13.12.2 — The Merge Sweep

54 community bug-fix PRs merged in one pass. Every open PR in the repo (157 total) was evaluated against a strict rubric — now codified in docs/merge-rubric.md: root-cause corrections only, with no guards, circuit breakers, fallbacks, retries, fail-open modes, self-healing machinery, truncation, or bolt-on second systems.

Windows

• Zombie-held worker ports now detected correctly, ending infinite startup-failure loops (#3356)
• Console-flash sweep: windowsHide on every remaining live spawn path — git, npm, IDE detection, Codex installer, worker wrapper, taskkill, MCP launcher (#3335, #3320, #3319, #3305, #2921)
• bun.exe resolved to its absolute path and spawned directly, skipping cmd.exe (which silently drops >8191-char PATH) (#3235, #3247)
• Worker ESM main detection via pathToFileURL (#3318); UTF-8 BOM tolerated in settings JSON read (#3307)
• Start-Process argument quoting survives spaced profile paths (#3293); codex.cmd shim quoting fixed (#3220)
• PowerShell call operator (&) added to Cursor/Windsurf hook commands (#2507)
• Missing Windows credential treated as absent instead of a spurious read failure (#3265); tests run on Windows via fileURLToPath (#3312)

Search & data integrity

• Semantic search preserves Chroma relevance ranking instead of silently reordering by recency (#3325)
• type=<custom> and non-category type filters no longer return empty results (#3281); date_from/date_to honored in worker searches (#3201)
• Merged-project records hydrate correctly on semantic-search ID lookups and worktree adoption patches Chroma by typed doc targets (#3342)
• getUserPromptsByIds applies limit after relevance reordering (#3347)
• Chroma watermark gaps persist across bootstrap and live sync — no more permanently stranded rows (#3364); duplicate IDs reconciled in place, stopping unbounded index growth (#3268)
• Custom observation types preserved instead of being misclassified as bugfix (#3185); files_modified is now evidence-gated from actual write/edit tool events (#3180)
• Tool payloads no longer double-encoded in observation prompts (#3150)
• Context generation opens SQLite strictly read-only under concurrent sessions (#3233)
• MCP tools/list advertises only tools that work in the active runtime (#3065); search routes to the Postgres-backed /v1/search in server runtime when it can serve the query faithfully (#3082)

Worker & providers

• CLAUDE_MEM_MAX_CONCURRENT_AGENTS actually enforced via atomic slot reservations (#3294)
• Observations attributed to the current prompt's project after repo/worktree switches (#3237); claimed batches preserved on auth-failure prose instead of being deleted (#3236)
• Worker startup waits through cold and concurrent readiness windows (#3238)
• Observer thinking disabled so thinking-only skips can't trigger harness re-prompts (#3256); observer SDK sessions no longer pollute the user's project transcript tree (#2942)
• CLAUDE_MEM_TIER_SUMMARY_MODEL honored on OpenAI-compatible providers (#3257)
• Stale default model ids updated: Sonnet/Opus (#3187) and retired Gemini models (#3283)
• __IMPORTANT MCP tool renamed important_workflow so strict clients can load the server (#3295); tsconfig moduleResolution moved to bundler for TS 6 (#3296)

Hooks, context & installers

• CLAUDE_MEM_EXCLUDED_PROJECTS honored on session-start injection (#3358); subagents without MCP tools skip file-context injection (#3341)
• ~ expanded in CLAUDE_MEM_DATA_DIR (#3350) and CLAUDE_CODE_PATH (#3275); Homebrew uvx path shared with the worker preflight (#3276)
• SessionStart no longer dumps raw JSON at the top of every session (#3282); Codex no longer receives a duplicate context payload (#3241) and transcripts continue after archival (#3223)
• Worktree compound keys preserved from subdirectories (#3304)
• Azure AI Foundry auth env preserved through the SDK sanitizer (#3314); invalid corpus names return 400 instead of 500 (#3251)
• Codex plugin cache actually installs during setup — best-effort wrapper deleted, fail-fast (#3066)
• mergeSettings and server bootstrap no longer destroy top-level settings keys (#2928, #2929)
• version-bump skill frontmatter name matches its directory (#3313)

Docs

• New docs/merge-rubric.md — the acceptance bar for bug-fix PRs, distilled from this sweep.

Thanks to everyone who contributed fixes: @rodboev, @stantheman0128, @huiihao, @jamincollins, @quinnmacro, @justindeisler, @davertor, @BBD-Resources, @povesma, @laihenyi, @LPdsgn, @KJJisBetter, @Steaeavean, @XX888QM, @rapidtackgithub, @SamuelZ12, @DNA, @girish-kanjiyani7, @E0993599799, @eslonaguiar, @desmond-rai, @Reese-max, @Wasabi-221, @mic2112, @yaw-sh, @derrickchwong, @SaadSharif4, @katsugtgz, @manoi-bms, @percy-raskova, @ShiroKSH, @eralpozcan, @anupamme, @SejiL, @remten341, @danscMax, @jamesdsizemore, and the PostHog bot fleet.