Kovanex — Changelog

v8.4.0 — Locia: separation of duties

Honest SoD on close — loci focus --as <actor> records who implemented a focus; loci close --as <actor> records who reviewed it. The close gate refuses when the closer is the implementer (unless forced), so a review can't be self-signed.

v8.3.0 — Locia: role registry

Registrar — a versioned registry of role definitions (loci registrar list|get|seed|version|ratify|deprecate|retire|fork). A role can't ratify its own revision — ratification is a human act — and a fork keeps a provenance edge back to its origin.

v8.2.0 — Locia: reconcile on close

loci reconcile — at course close, compares the beams that were planned against those actually delivered and reports the drift, so a course closes on evidence rather than vibes. Adds the close/boundary CLI and the loci freight apply intake front.

v8.1.0 — Locia: charter (upper contour)

Charter / Ustav — a ratifiable charter (goal, scope, success criteria) that gates a course before work starts. The keystone of governing an agent from outside: nothing runs until the thread is chartered.

v8.0.2 — bugfixes

Round-trippable task ids — the server now resolves an unambiguous short id prefix (the 8-hex form --ufn prints) for get/move/update/assign, so MCP, the SDKs, the PWA, and raw gRPC round-trip a listed id without a second lookup. Ambiguous prefixes error instead of guessing.
releases verify now accepts <project> <version> (as create/list do), not only a release UUID.
No more zombie CI runs — a runner reaps a step's whole process group on every completion, not just on cancel, so a backgrounded grandchild (a stray trainer, a leaked daemon) can't outlive its step.

v8.0.1 — Locia thread authoring

loci apply — author a project's guiding thread from a manifest, plus set-star / set-course to point the ★ Star and ⟋ Course. Client-side; no server change.

v8.0.0 — Locia: guiding-thread PM for AI agents

Locia — a project-management discipline for work run by an AI agent, built into the platform. It treats PM not as coordinating labour but as allocating a forgetful executor's attention over a lossless store, governed from outside: one ★ Star → one ⟋ Course → one ▼ Focus (WIP=1).
LociaService gRPC + kovanex-ctl loci slice — the server derives the authoritative grounding slice (star / course / the one in-progress focus + scope + fired invariants) from the store and emits it as UFN, so an agent grounds the same truth every session.
Server-side WIP=1 — the one-focus-on-the-tip invariant is enforced by the board (audit mode by default, flip to enforce), and the Beam object model overlays scope + bound invariants + DoD on each task.
The open standard lives at locia.kovanex.dev.

v7.15.0 — security hardening

Vault privilege de-escalation — a non-admin role no longer receives an admin token; access is readonly or denied.
Git RBAC — real owner / admin / public repo-access checks (audit mode by default, flip to enforce, self-lockout-safe).
Opt-in TLS verification — a CA-aware client TLS path (KOVANEX_TLS_VERIFY / KOVANEX_CA_FILE) across the SDK, MCP, logs, and runner-vault clients.

v7.14.0 — config hardening

Honest CI — retired the dead-infra pipeline jobs so a green run means green; test + no-Russian lint run on a live runner, deploy is tag-gated.
Single-source host config — one internal/config is the source of truth for hosts, ports, and paths; no more scattered hardcoded literals rediscovered on every relocation.

v7.13.0 — durable logs & runner reliability

Durable pipeline logs — a job's output is captured to a bounded on-disk ring on the runner (with rotation), so logs survive a server or runner restart. kovanex-ctl pipelines logs now reads from the store instead of a live-only stream, with a --ufn event layer (job.start / step.done / job.done).
Crash-safe runners — a runner owns a local durable queue: a job survives a server or runner crash and its result reconciles on reconnect, so nothing is lost. Stale runners expire from the pool so online is honest, cancel tears down the whole process group (no zombies), and the macOS runner autostarts durably.
UFN everywhere in ctl — one consistent --ufn / --json path across runners, status, and more.

v7.11.0 — UFN v2

UFN v2 everywhere — a compact one-line record format with nesting and ligatures; kovanex-ctl --ufn list economy plus nested get, and the MCP server now speaks UFN with a compact-JSON fallback.
Leaner reads — --json output trimmed ~36%, so agents burn even fewer tokens scanning lists.
MCP tool annotations — read-only / destructive / idempotent hints, plus short-id (#number / 8-hex) addressing in tool calls.

v7.10.0 — vault sealed-boot

Secrets from the vault — the server loads its own secrets (JWT, AI keys) from sys/* on unseal; the only bootstrap secret on a box is the unseal key.
Sealed-state lock — while sealed, human login is refused and only agent (device-PSK) auth works — exactly enough to unseal.
Break-glass super-login — a bootstrap admin can sign in while sealed to perform the first unseal, then everything flows through the vault.

v7.9.0 — developer experience

Human/agent addressing — reference tasks by #number or a short id prefix, and projects by name/slug (KOVANEX_PROJECT), not just 36-char UUIDs. Unknown project is now a hard error instead of a silent empty list.
--retry (default 3) — the CLI rides out transient gRPC flaps automatically; no more hand-rolled retry loops.
--json / --ufn everywhere — structured output across all the read commands (repos, pr, agents, vault, projects, messages…).
Safer + fuller surface — flag-as-value validation (no more a project literally named --help), tasks delete, and tasks start (create → in progress in one step).
MCP parity — releases, vault, audit, and PR tools added.
AGENTS.md — a one-page orientation for agents.

v7.8.1 — UFN output mode

kovanex-ctl --ufn — a compact, flat one-line-per-record output for the list commands (tasks/pipelines/releases/ problems), ~89% smaller than JSON on big lists, so agents burn far fewer tokens reading them. JSON stays the default; --ufn is opt-in and falls back to JSON on single-object reads.

v7.8.0 — agent ergonomics

Structured --json on the agent-facing read commands (tasks list/get, board, pipelines list/get, releases list, problems list/get) — no more scraping pretty tables.
Pipeline job ids in pipelines get --json, so pipelines logs <pipeline> <job> is reachable directly.
MCP fixed & widened — fixed a startup crash that made the MCP server non-functional, and added notes_* (knowledge graph) and problems_* (root-cause) tools. Read more →

v7.7.0 — agent skill library

Nine downloadable, agent-native skills over Kovanex — kovaflow (task discipline), kovaci (CI triage), kovasite (publish to site), kovaship (cut releases), kovaproblem (root-cause graph), kovaprobe (cluster health), kovapr (PR review), kovaudit (audit), and kovadocs (embedded docs) — each shipped as a SKILL.md + a versioned bundle.

v7.6.1 — only-mode crash fix & PWA proto refresh

Fixed a server crash in single-store (KOVADB_MODE=only) deployments: the kanban/project services were wired to the detached external-DB task store instead of the embedded one, so loading the board faulted. Found while building the new screenshots on a clean local instance; patched same day.
Refreshed the proto schema bundled into the PWA so the Knowledge Base and Problems views resolve their message types correctly.

v7.6.0 — UI/PWA, Knowledge Base & client binaries

Knowledge Base & Problems in the UI — the PWA and the native desktop app gained Knowledge (notes + backlinks + search) and Problems (root-cause) views.
kovamem skill — graph-backed agent memory over the KB, shipped in skills/kovamem/ and documented at /skills.
Client binaries — kovanex-ctl and kovanex-mcp for macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel) and Linux at /download.
Website rewritten around kovadb (the embedded store replaced the external database in v7.4).

v7.5.1 — vector store crash fix

Hardened semantic search against a crash on vector re-index (the HNSW engine could fault when an existing vector was replaced). The vector map is now the source of truth with the index as a rebuildable, crash-safe cache. Found by dogfooding; patched same day.

v7.5.0 — semantic search, problem management, CI gate

Semantic vector search — k-NN over an embedded HNSW index across tasks & notes. Agent-native: the AI supplies the embeddings over the CLI; no bundled model, no external embeddings API.
Problem management — root-cause Problems that link the tasks/bugs they explain, answered as kovadb graph queries.
CI no-Russian gate — a diff-scoped lint that blocks builds on newly introduced non-English source.

v7.4.0 — kovadb migration

Migrated off the external database onto kovadb — an embedded, pure-Go document + graph + vector store. One file now backs every domain; there is no separate database process to run.
The knowledge base (Markdown vault + backlink graph, Obsidian-compatible) landed in this line.

Earlier history (v1.0–v7.1) →