Changelog

All notable changes to @metacoding.io/regulator are recorded here. The format follows Keep a Changelog; versions follow Semantic Versioning. Until 1.0.0, a minor version may change the CLI or the definition's file formats; a patch version does not.

Unreleased

Changed

• The registry cards speak the product's vocabulary (#93). Where a card said "lesson 12" or "checkpoint 9" it now names the extension, the regulator, the debt row or the release; the course is cited only where it is the source (a drill, the retired lesson 02 gate). ownership.owner is regulator-maintainers on every record instead of the design-phase course-lab. docs/GLOSSARY.md's "where it lives" column drops the module numbers, and its diagnostic table and PATHOLOGIES.md say which column is the course's.
• A registry record added between releases says introducedIn: "unreleased" (#92). The schema admits the word beside semver, REGULATORS.md renders it as "unreleased", the release commit rewrites it to the version being tagged (CONTRIBUTING.md § Releasing), and the release workflow refuses to publish while any record still says so. pre-merge-trial is the first: it said 0.1.4 before any release existed.
• The identity's context limit is the budget policy's, and the default is 12000 characters (#91). renderIdentitySection cut at 6000, a constant; the seed the definition ships renders to 7005, so the tail of GLOSSARY.md was not reaching units (found by #51). Rather than shorten the seed, the default is raised to 12000 (about 3000 tokens) and a policy may declare identity.maxChars; the identity extension, regulator check, regulator doctor and the warning all measure against the limit that applies. The shipped definition passes check with no warning.

Added

• The identity's context budget is measured, and the cut is reported (#51, DEBT row 25). renderIdentitySection truncates at 6000 characters; nothing said when it did. identityContextBudget (core) now measures the whole rendering against the limit and names the files cut; regulator check and regulator doctor warn with the size, the limit and the files — a warning, not a problem, since a long set is valid — and doctor --json carries it on the identity check (warning) with a warnings count on the report; the session's status line says truncated at 6000 of N characters, and the identity extension records one advisory operational-signal per session on the unit, with the files cut as evidence, so the unit's record shows it ran with part of its identity unseen. Found on the way: the seed the definition ships renders to 7005 characters, so the tail of GLOSSARY.md has not been reaching units; regulator check now says so, and what to do about it (shorten the seed, or make the limit a policy field) is a decision recorded in the open-questions backlog rather than taken here, since the live runs (#46) are measuring the prompt as it is.

Changed

• The post-merge check is replaced by a pre-merge trial (#48, DEBT row 37). Reintegration now merges the unit's branch in a temporary worktree detached at the base's HEAD, runs the workload's run_tests and run_checks on that merged tree, and lands a passing tree by fast-forward to the very commit that was verified; a failing tree lands nothing, the base is exactly as it was, and the unit is blocked with the cause conflict (repair, under the shipped policy) with the failing checks as its hint. The base is never red; the instance-level obligation the post-merge check opened is no longer produced. unit finish runs the same trial with the project's own two checks. The evidence is pre-merge:*, bound to the trial commit; a closed outcome carries preMerge in place of postMerge; a base that moves during the trial is refused as base-moved. The post-merge-check record is retired as history and pre-merge-trial (44 records, 42 active) states the cost, measured.

Added

• A workload's check entry may carry options, and glossary-lint takes one: { "name": "glossary-lint", "options": { "commitMessages": "advisory" } } makes a refused word in a commit message evidence and an audit-finding at advisory instead of a failed check, while the comment half stays blocking (#47, DEBT row 36). software-development and the drift suite's arms declare it; personal-finance does not. regulator check refuses an option a check does not take. The regenerated sloppy report shows the cost that was being paid: the four units whose only drift was a word in the commit message now close on their first attempt, and the two whose comments drifted are still refused.
• waitCeilingMs on the interaction policy (#52, DEBT row 30). A unit paused on a question nobody has answered for that long is routed under the recovery policy's timeout cause (retry, retry, escalate by the shipped rules; each routing past the ceiling is one occurrence) and its lease is released, so a unit going nowhere does not hold the worktree. The question stays open with its veto and its history says why; nothing answers on anyone's behalf. The field is optional and the shipped policy leaves it unset: the honest default is to wait.

Changed

• A registry record's enforcement points are typed (#76). mechanism.enforcementPoints[] was free text with the point as a prefix; it is now { where, point, note? } with where one of host (a session event the Pi host subscribes to, or dispatcher), tool (a registered tool's execute), loop (a step of the S3 loop or the unit lifecycle), cli (a regulator subcommand) or check, and point from that place's closed list (ENFORCEMENT_POINTS in @metacoding.io/regulator-protocol). regulator check refuses an unknown place or point by name; tests hold each list against the code, so a host event, a tool, a loop step or a subcommand that is not on its list fails the build. REGULATORS.md, BOUNDARY.md and the control room print host:tool_call (write, edit: prepareWritePath). This is the first slice of the figures generated from the definition (ROADMAP.md, threads).
• A registry record's introducedIn is the package version that first shipped it (0.1.0 for the forty-three records that exist), not the design phase's checkpoint number (M03); the schema requires semver and REGULATORS.md and the control room render it as "since 0.1.0". A record added after this carries the version it lands in (#56).

Fixed

• The usage line and the CLI reference name identity promote --definition <dir> and eval --host <package>, which the commands accepted undocumented. REGULATORS.md opens with an introduction to what a record is and how to read one.
• regulator unit accept recorded --by as given, while the disposition-authority card said the name was checked against the interaction policy. An acceptance is a disposition (it satisfies a criterion no check can observe, and the closeout gate counts it), so the command now goes through the same check as answer and obligation resolve, at blocking — the conservative choice for a criterion that has no severity of its own — and a name the policy does not list is refused before anything is written; --reject is checked the same way. init and eval still record --by as provenance without the check (#77).
• regulator unit start printed a pi -e command naming dist/tools.js and dist/coordination.js under the control plane, where the session extensions have not lived since the host seam split; copied from an install, the command failed. The line now asks the host for its extension paths (host.extensionPath), honouring --host and REGULATOR_HOST as unit dispatch does. With no host resolvable the start still takes the lease and makes the worktree, and says a session there needs a host instead of printing a command that cannot work (#79).

0.1.3 — 2026-09-29

The second live drift run (issue #46, on 0.1.2) closed ten of twelve units and found what happens after the budget guard halts one.

Fixed

• A halt by the budget guard was failed over as a provider failure. The guard aborts the session when a ceiling is crossed and Pi records the abort as an errored assistant message; the dispatcher read the message alone, opened a fresh session on each declared fallback, and reported "every model in the route failed" when the last one did. Each fallback session also started a new ledger for the same attempt, so the primary's spend and the exhausted marker were overwritten and the loop classed the unit as a dispatch error (recovery cause environment) instead of budget-exhausted, which the recovery policy routes differently. The dispatcher now reads the attempt's ledger before deciding (attemptEnd): a halt is returned to the loop as the attempt's end and is never failed over; only an errored message without a halt is a provider failure. A session that opens on an attempt another session already metered resumes that ledger (BudgetMeter resume), so the attempt has one ledger whichever sessions ran it, the primary's spend counts against the same ceiling, and a halt stays a halt.
• The default policy's last fallback for every route, google/gemini-2.5-flash, is retired by Google for new keys and answered every call with a 404; the routes now fall back to google/gemini-3.8-flash, which the pinned Pi registry knows. Nothing checks a route against the provider before dispatch; the model-router card says so.
• regulator unit show … | head crashed the CLI with EPIPE once the reader closed the pipe; the CLI now exits cleanly.

0.1.2 — 2026-09-28

The first live drift run (issue #46) found the live dispatch path had never been exercised end to end.

Fixed

• Live units ran with every session-bound regulator inert. The dispatcher created a Pi session and prompted it, but never called session.bindExtensions(...), which is what emits session_start in Pi's own modes. The contract, the profile grant, the budget guard, the identity section and the algedonic path all initialize on that event, so a live unit ran as a plain coding agent: no contract in its prompt, report_result refused for want of a contract, nothing metered, every unit blocked as no-report. openUnitSession now opens and binds the session the way pi -p does, emits session_shutdown before disposing, and a headless test drives the real path with no model and asserts the contract is bound, the profile's tool surface is set and the ledger is written before the first prompt.
• Binding the session exposed the next gap: the implement, research, bookkeeper and auditor profiles did not grant report_result, so a bound unit could never close either. Every profile a contracted unit type runs under now grants it, regulator check refuses a contracted unit type whose profile does not (the contract extension also puts the tool on the surface when a contract loads, as a backstop), and the effect declarations distinguish a control-plane record (a report, a proposal, intelligence, a fact: the domain untouched, the record reversible) from a domain write, so a read-only profile can still report.

Changed

• regulator check refuses a committed eval report under evals/reports/ that still carries the placeholder interpretation regulator eval writes without --interpretation (by "nobody yet", or "not yet interpreted by a person" in the text). The placeholder is exported from the protocol as UNINTERPRETED_BY, UNINTERPRETED_MARKER and isUninterpreted.

0.1.1 — 2026-09-25

The first install from npm found two things the workspace never exercised.

Fixed

• regulator on the path: dist/cli.js had no shebang, so the bin link ran it as a shell script. node dist/cli.js was unaffected.
• regulator doctor from an installed package reported every registry record's implementation and cited tests as missing: the paths name source files the package does not ship. The registry check now verifies paths only in a source checkout (a src/ beside the registry) and doctor says when it did not; pnpm check at the release is where they are verified. The regulator-lifecycle card states the limit.

0.1.0 — 2026-09-24

The first versioned release: the course's reference build, relocated from course/lab to packages/regulator unchanged, with the regulator status read model folded in from the former @metacoding/vsm-pi-cli.

Added

• The package scope @metacoding.io: @metacoding.io/regulator (this package), -pi, -protocol, -core, -checks and -control-room, released together from one tag.
• The regulator CLI: init, doctor, unit start|dispatch|drive|route|show|close|accept|evidence|finish|status, contract check, obligations, obligation show|ack|resolve|escalate, answer, remind, memory, identity accept|reject|promote, signals route, effects, watch, eval, spans, review, status, fixture.
• The host seam (Host, loadHost): the control plane resolves a host package by name and runs live units through its dispatcher; @metacoding.io/regulator-pi is the Pi host, with the eleven session extensions (tools, profiles, coordination, contract, budget, recovery, evidence, authority, intelligence, identity, algedonic) loaded by pi install, the dispatcher, the write gate and the typed reporting tools folded in from the former @metacoding/vsm-pi-extension.
• The definition beside the code: forty-three registry records (forty-two active; the lexical vendor write gate of lesson 02 retired, superseded by the authority extension and the manifest's protected prefixes) with REGULATORS.md and BOUNDARY.md generated from them, the identity seed, five profiles, five policies, two workloads (software development, personal finance), the drift eval suite with four committed reports, and the contracts the lessons run.
• Host checks at closeout: run_checks, run_tests, inherited-tests, identity-untouched, export-signature, glossary-lint.