Release 0.5.0

What is new in Orchemax 0.5.0 (preview, early access by invitation): gates at the moment of action, stdin-safe shells, self-trimming footprint, a truthful session start, the improvement cycle and a Chair held to the same rules.

Orchemax 0.5.0 — preview, early access by invitation.

Terms used below: the Chair is the agent you talk to, which plans and coordinates the work; a worker is an agent the Chair starts for one task in its own copy of the code; a seal is the automatic check that closes a worker's task; landing is merging checked work into main and installing it.

Orchemax is the background layer for coding agents: it works with the agent CLI you already use, and only sessions opened with orch <agent> get its rules, gates, memory and lessons.

Highlights#

  • Gates at the moment of action. Every tool call is judged by hooks. A worker's commit runs the same gates the final seal runs (generated outputs unstaged, ledger edits, removed tests, unlocked shared writes, red-first), so it learns in seconds instead of after a full seal. The seal stays as the backstop.
  • Stdin-safe shells. A command that would wait on stdin forever (a bare interpreter or REPL, an empty heredoc) is refused for every seat, with the fix in one line.
  • Orchemax releases what it fills. It measures its own footprint (build cache, worktrees, scratch, logs) in orch stats, trims the Go build cache when idle and over its limit, removes stray orch binaries at start, and frees dead workers' worktrees without losing their branches or uncommitted work.
  • A truthful session start. The Chair's start card is built from Orchemax's own records: sessions that died are shown as died, branches already merged are not listed, and pending ledger lines are shown rather than counted.
  • The improvement cycle as a mechanism. Every error, a worker's or the Chair's, becomes a row that moves detect → correct → improve (a gate) → memorize (a lesson) → learn (shown at the action) → repeat (verified no recurrence). A turn or a session cannot close with an unmemorized error, a recurrence reopens it, and a gate that catches an error before harm counts as the mechanism holding.
  • The Chair is held to the same rules. Briefs without invariants-with-tests or an out-of-scope section are refused, repeated overrides of a gate must name the item that fixes it, and the land never blocks itself and waits for a quiet machine.
  • Faster dispatch. One dispatch spawns fewer git processes: 142 down to 99, measured on one test run. Further speed work ships in 0.5.0.

Upgrade#

  1. Replace the binary in the install folder with the 0.5.0 one (see Install).
  2. Run orch doctor --fix in each workshop.
  3. Confirm with orch version, which prints 0.5.0.

Notes#