Repo Continuity v4.5.0

Repo Continuity v4.5.0

Repo Continuity now gives historical knowledge an explicit archival lifecycle. Daily work uses current knowledge and small open-task routes; historical evidence remains available without being read during ordinary discovery.

What Changed

• Each open WORK or Initiative has its own Markdown route under zettelkasten/work/active/. Status, acceptance, checkpoints, and relationships remain authoritative at the original source path. Closure removes the route.
• Archive long terminal WORK or Initiative records and retired knowledge notes into original-byte snapshots. Their stable source paths retain compact summaries, heading anchors, relationships, evidence links, and checksums. Preview, idempotent archive, and verified restore are available through the optional Companion Skill.
• Archival checks unresolved acceptance, experience candidates, and gates. Open work and Initiatives with open children cannot be archived. Retiring a multi-file project Skill remains a deliberate directory-and-link update documented in the lifecycle.
• Ordinary Doctor checks and status discovery exclude archive bodies and unrelated historical WORK records. A referenced terminal dependency is resolved from its summary; daily discovery stops before expanding older prerequisite chains. Use --full for complete route coverage, historical child membership, wiki links, and archive checksums.
• Existing projects get an explicit, previewable routing migration. A newly copied route directory starts pending, so an empty upgrade directory cannot silently hide existing tasks.
• This release also includes the post-v4.4.1 fixes for per-line required-heading detection and baseline error examples that track the actual Companion Skill default version.

The core remains Markdown and Git only. WORK IDs, canonical paths, the repo-continuity Skill ID, and the payload marker remain stable. Scripts remain optional and are not copied into the downstream core.

Upgrade Existing Projects

Install the v4.5.0 Companion Skill and follow the three-way upgrade guide on an isolated task branch, preserving the project's pre-upgrade checkpoint and local customization. After reconciling the new lifecycle and entry rules, build the open-work routes explicitly:

# SKILL_ROOT is the installed v4.5.0 Companion Skill directory.
# PROJECT_ROOT is the initialized project being upgraded.
python3 "$SKILL_ROOT/scripts/workflow_archive.py" reindex --root "$PROJECT_ROOT" --dry-run
python3 "$SKILL_ROOT/scripts/workflow_archive.py" reindex --root "$PROJECT_ROOT"
python3 "$SKILL_ROOT/scripts/workflow_doctor.py" --root "$PROJECT_ROOT" --full --strict

Review the preview before applying. Resolve invalid source metadata and coordinate the rebuild with other writers. The same routes can be created manually with Markdown; mark Routing status: ready only after every open record is represented. Existing helpers that relied on a full Doctor audit must now request --full explicitly. Advance the project's recorded template baseline only after review and validation pass.

Installation, upgrade, and reindex do not archive or delete project history automatically. Archive selected historical bodies only after preserving applicable knowledge and closure evidence. See the canonical lifecycle and archive/restore helper guide.

中文说明

此版本将归档纳入正式生命周期。日常任务通过轻量入口定位当前工作，已归档正文和无关历史任务退出默认扫描；原路径、结论、关系和可校验原文仍可追溯和恢复。

旧项目升级后需要显式建立任务入口。 按中文升级指南协调新规则，再预览并执行上面的 reindex，最后运行完整检查。升级不会自动归档或删除历史。已有自动化若需要检查全部历史，请明确使用 Doctor 的 --full 选项。

Repo Continuity v4.4.1

Repo Continuity v4.4.1 fixes three defects that made the v4.3.0 upgrade path unusable on exactly the projects it targets.

Highlights:

• Three-way reconciliation no longer aborts the whole run when a file has two or more conflict regions. git merge-file returns the conflict count as its exit code, so any 2+ conflict file previously raised git merge-file failed: N and stopped --upgrade-apply. The longer a project has been initialized, the more certain this was to trigger.
• Genuine git merge-file failures are still raised. The check is 0 < rc < 128, because git exits 255 on error, which a plain rc > 0 would have silently misread as a conflict.
• Doctor no longer reports wiki links inside fenced blocks or inline code. Bash test syntax collides with wiki-link syntax, so a runbook quoting [[ "$rc" == "0" ]] was flagged as a broken link — a finding that could only be silenced by altering a verbatim quotation of the code under review.
• INIT.md states that the Template baseline: line in zettelkasten/AI.md is a machine-parsed contract. Rewording it leaves a repository unable to resolve its own baseline, and the failure surfaces only at the first upgrade, long after the edit. The parser error now names the expected prefix instead of only suggesting --baseline-ref.
• Adds regression coverage for both code paths and wires it into CI. The distribution smoke test only exercised initialization via --target, so --upgrade-apply and link scanning had no coverage at all, which is how these shipped.
• Registers template/INIT.md as a release-version surface so its baseline example cannot drift behind future releases.

Upgrading an initialized project: install the v4.4.1 Companion Skill, then run the three-way reconciliation as described in docs/upgrading.md. Existing projects are not modified automatically.

Repo Continuity v4.4.0

Repo Continuity v4.4.0 adds bounded decomposition for large requirements.

Highlights:

• Prefer an existing Jira, GitHub, GitLab, or other project-native Epic as the authoritative parent.
• Add one optional local Initiative to coordinate independent child WORK records when no external parent exists.
• Limit the local hierarchy to Initiative to WORK; recursive Initiatives and parent-WORK trees are rejected.
• Add strict depends_on prerequisites, dependency-cycle checks, parent integrity checks, and Doctor-derived Initiative rollups.
• Keep child resume context minimal: load a relevant Initiative constraint when needed and do not load sibling WORK records by default.
• Align the Companion Skill, helpers, English and Chinese documentation, examples, behavior cases, and distribution validation.

Upgrade:

Install the v4.4.0 Companion Skill, run upgrade-report first, then preview upgrade-apply before accepting conflict-free changes. Existing repository customization remains authoritative.

Validation:

The complete distribution lifecycle and real temporary initialized-project structural tests passed. A live Fresh-Agent semantic probe was attempted but could not obtain a model response because the ChatGPT endpoint timed out, so it is not reported as passing behavior evidence.

v4.3.0 - Learning loop and safe upgrades

Highlights

• Adds an evidence-backed Repository Learning Loop that turns verified, reusable project experience into durable repository rules and on-demand project Skills.
• Adds read-only upgrade analysis with --upgrade-report, safe preview with --upgrade-apply --dry-run, and transactional safe reconciliation with --upgrade-apply.
• Safely applies upstream additions, upstream-only changes, and clean text three-way merges while preserving local customizations and reporting removals or true conflicts for manual review.
• Keeps the installed template baseline unchanged until the upgraded project has been validated and the user explicitly accepts the new baseline.
• Adds English and Chinese upgrade guides, deterministic learning helpers, lifecycle validation, and Fresh-Agent evaluation evidence.

Compatibility

• Existing initialized repositories should not rerun INIT.md; install the target Companion Skill and use the upgrade workflow instead.
• The downstream core remains usable with Markdown and Git alone. Companion Skill automation is optional.
• Codex and Claude Code model-routing overlays remain opt-in and preserve the root-session model by default.
• No telemetry, autonomous runtime, or automatic cross-project collection is introduced.

Upgrade outline

1. Install the target Companion Skill from this release.
2. Run bootstrap_knowledge.py --target <repo> --upgrade-report --ref v4.3.0.
3. Preview with --upgrade-apply --dry-run, then apply with --upgrade-apply on a clean task branch.
4. Validate the project and explicitly update .repo-continuity-template only after accepting the result.

Validation

• The complete distribution lifecycle validator passes, including fresh installs, upgrade scenarios, core-only operation, opt-in adapters, and payload leakage checks.
• GitHub Actions passed for the release commit.
• The current Companion Skill installs successfully with skills@1.5.19.
• A real ephemeral Fresh-Agent test using gpt-5.6-sol recovered the work route, acceptance criteria, commits, validation, risk, next action, learning candidate, and project Skill while leaving the repository unchanged.

See docs/UPGRADING.md, docs/UPGRADING.zh-CN.md, and docs/evaluations/v4.3.0-fresh-agent.md for details.

v4.2.0 - Optional model routing

Highlights

• Adds opt-in Codex and Claude Code specialist model-routing overlays while keeping core-only installation as the default.
• Preserves the user's root-session model; explorer and implementer use lower-cost models, while reviewer and architect use higher-capability models.
• Renames the Companion Skill from ai-collaboration-workflow to repo-continuity.
• Pins the Companion Skill bootstrap and Quick Start to v4.2.0.

Compatibility

• Existing initialized repositories do not need to be initialized again.
• Users upgrading the global Companion Skill should remove ai-collaboration-workflow, install repo-continuity, and invoke $repo-continuity.
• Model routing remains disabled unless explicitly requested.
• The Doctor and initialization cleanup still recognize the legacy payload marker for interrupted setups.
• This release does not use GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark.

Validation

• Full distribution lifecycle validation passes.
• The official skills CLI installs repo-continuity from the public v4.2.0 tag.
• The installed Skill bootstraps 22 core files from the pinned tag with no model-routing adapter by default.
• Public opt-in Codex routing installs the expected .codex configuration and all four specialist agents.

v4.1.1 - Repo Continuity

Highlights\n\n- Renames the product to Repo Continuity and moves the canonical repository to https://github.com/vector233/repo-continuity.\n- Rewrites the English and Chinese README opening around the product's core capabilities: cross-agent recovery, focused context loading, proportional workflow, durable learning, and safe parallel work.\n- Removes release-history and breaking-change discussion from the README so the main documentation stays capability-first.\n- Updates Companion Skill display metadata, bootstrap defaults, community publishing copy, and repository metadata to the new brand.\n\n## Compatibility\n\n- The existing ai-collaboration-workflow Skill ID and payload marker remain stable.\n- GitHub redirects the previous repository URL to Repo Continuity.\n- Existing initialized projects are not modified automatically.\n\n## Validation\n\n- Full distribution lifecycle validation passes.\n- Official Agent Skill validation passes.\n- The v4.1.1 payload remains usable with Markdown and Git alone; companion tooling stays optional.

v4.1.0 - Context continuity

Highlights\n\n- Preserves recoverable WORK state after bounded Tracked or Governed slices and before meaningful context boundaries, while Direct work that finishes in one context still creates no WORK.\n- Separates structural knowledge checks from a semantic Fresh-Agent Resume Probe with real run provenance.\n- Makes durable experience writeback idempotent by searching canonical destinations, recording no-op results, and coordinating one writer through owned_paths.\n- Updates English and Chinese onboarding and pins new installations to v4.1.0.\n\n## Product boundary\n\n- The core remains plain Markdown and Git; companion helpers are optional.\n- This release adds no autonomous loop, scheduler, runtime telemetry requirement, hidden memory, or automatic cross-project feedback.\n- Existing initialized projects are not rewritten automatically. Adopt selected v4.1.0 rules manually when useful.\n\n## Validation\n\n- Full distribution lifecycle validation passes.\n- Official Agent Skill validation passes.\n- A real Fresh-Agent resume probe recovered route, acceptance state, commits, validation, unresolved risk, next action, and Skill routing from five repository files without a helper.

v4.0.0 - Knowledge-first workflow

Highlights

• Re-centers the template on a vendor-neutral, repository-owned project knowledge network.
• Routes work as Direct, Tracked, or Governed without a mandatory document chain.
• Uses one stable WORK record for tracked and governed tasks, including governed decisions, approvals, evidence, and rollback gates.
• Promotes durable experience into rules, linked notes, runbooks, or on-demand project Skills.
• Supports parallel task branches and worktrees while keeping companion helpers optional.
• Adds an opt-in, privacy-reviewed feedback path for improving the upstream template.

Breaking changes

• This release is a new-project template and does not provide migration or compatibility behavior for previous layouts.
• Removes numbered zettelkasten directories and independent REQ, TECH, PLAN, and REVIEW workflow artifacts.
• Flattens durable knowledge entry points and upgrades the payload marker to canonical-payload-v4.

Validation

• Full distribution lifecycle validation passes, including tool-free initialization, single-WORK routing, governed gate enforcement, knowledge links, project Skills, optional helpers, and worktree isolation.
• Official Agent Skill validation passes.