Changelog

0.26.2 — 2026-10-07

Codex sessions show a real short id in vir run --dry-run, vir cost, vir reconcile and the logs (TRAIN/d8e621fc, not TRAIN/rollout-). Every short id now comes from the same helper as note filenames; a test keeps it that way.
A Codex-only vir init no longer offers to register with Claude Code. It prints the Codex config snippet instead (codex mcp add vir -- vir mcp). With both agents ticked you get the Claude Code offer and the snippet.

0.26.1 — 2026-10-07

Re-running vir init offers Codex once it’s installed. On a Claude-only install the wizard now pre-checks Codex too when ~/.codex/sessions exists, as the README says, instead of only the agents already configured.
A Codex desktop chat started in ~/Documents/Codex itself goes to codex-scratch like the dated chats under it, instead of a project named Codex.
vir doctor no longer says “codex CLI not found” when codex login status hangs or crashes; it reports the actual error. Only a missing binary reads as not installed.

0.26.0 — 2026-10-07

vir reads Codex sessions too, and can distill them on your ChatGPT plan with no API key.

Codex sessions. Set codexSessionsDir (or re-run vir init, which now asks which coding agents you use) and vir reads ~/.codex/sessions/ alongside Claude Code. Harness context Codex stores as user messages (environment, AGENTS.md, IDE and file wrappers, in-app browser state, agent-history replays) is stripped; only your request survives. Subagent and review threads are skipped like Claude Code sidechains, codex exec runs are skipped like SDK agents, and desktop chats outside a repo group as one codex-scratch project. A project used from both agents is one project. New Codex projects start undecided, so nothing is spent until you include them. Archived Codex threads are not read.
provider: "codex-cli" (experimental). Distills through codex exec on your ChatGPT login: keyless, quota instead of dollars, with the same per-run cap and halt-on-limit as claude-cli. Calls run read-only and ephemeral, with Codex’s shell, web search, apps, plugins and subagents switched off. Codex picks the model unless you pin one. vir doctor checks codex login status.
vir sync-claude also updates AGENTS.md files that already exist (~/.codex/AGENTS.md and project roots, found the same way as CLAUDE.md) with the same VIR block. Rules still get their one y/n against CLAUDE.md; AGENTS.md carries the rules you approved. --no-agents leaves AGENTS.md alone, --agents-only updates only AGENTS.md (approved rules, no prompts). A missing AGENTS.md is never created or listed.
vir mcp install --target codex prints the ~/.codex/config.toml block (or the codex mcp add vir -- vir mcp one-liner); vir never edits Codex’s config itself.
Security: claude-cli distill calls run with no tools. claude -p loaded your tools, MCP servers and permission allowlist, while the prompt carries transcript text vir doesn’t control. Calls now pass --tools "" and --strict-mcp-config: no built-in tools, no MCP servers, no claude.ai connectors.
Prompts. Codex sessions are described as “Codex session” in the classify and distill prompts; Claude Code prompts are unchanged byte for byte.
Doctor and projects. One sessions check per configured agent; vir projects shows a sources column once a second agent is configured; the “prunes at ~30 days” warning only appears when a pending session can actually be pruned.
vir connect says “1 candidate”, not “1 candidates”.
README: a short demo of the connect → review → sync-claude flow.

0.25.3 — 2026-10-06

Small fixes from the first real vir connect run.

vir sync-claude asks again on a typo at the per-rule y / n / s and the final y / n prompts, instead of treating it as skip or abort. In a terminal it re-asks up to 5 times; without one it asks once, as before.
No rule prompt for a CLAUDE.md that doesn’t exist. Such a rule could never be written and was re-asked every run; sync-claude now says once that it’s waiting for that file.
Sources from merged duplicates are marked merged in the rule hunk, the review screen and the rule file, so the same [[note]] appearing twice is explained.
vir connect --dry-run writes nothing, not even the lesson-embedding cache, and its cost estimate uses the real output cap (1200 tokens), so “up to $X” is a true upper bound.
MCP vir_query keeps project-scoped rules under a project filter; rejected-rule matching compares vectors from one embedding model only; rule files say which lines an edit keeps.

0.25.2 — 2026-10-06

Ships the 0.25.1 fix for real. The 0.25.1 package was built a moment before the fix was merged, so it carried 0.25.0 code: vir sync-claude still skipped project folders like pripremi.rs. 0.25.2 is the same source as 0.25.1, built correctly.

0.25.1 — 2026-10-06

vir sync-claude finds projects whose folder name isn’t already a slug. A project folder like pripremi.rs or My App never matched its own project slug (pripremi-rs, my-app), so its CLAUDE.md was reported as missing and skipped — it never got a VIR block, and a connect-pass rule scoped to it could not be promoted. Folders under ~/projects, ~/code and ~/dev whose kebab-cased name equals the slug are now matched, after every exact match, so projects that already resolved are unaffected.

0.25.0 — 2026-10-06

vir notices lessons you keep re-learning and proposes them as rules — cited, reviewed, and added to CLAUDE.md only with your yes. Plus a skill so any coding agent can use your notes.

vir connect: recurring lessons become proposed rules. It finds a lesson you’ve recorded in at least 3 sessions spanning at least 7 days (clustering individual “What Was Learned” items by embedding), and asks the model to state it as one rule with a verbatim quote from each cited note. Invented quotes are discarded. Rules are written to insights/rules/ as proposed and stay out of vir query/MCP until you accept them with vir review --insights. Accepted rules reach CLAUDE.md only via vir sync-claude, one y/n per rule, never under --force, --dry-run or a non-interactive shell. Rejections are remembered by session, so they survive note rewrites. vir connect --dry-run is free; a real run makes at most connectMaxCandidates (default 10) LLM calls and asks first. Requires an embedding provider. Thresholds are calibrated on a real 1,292-lesson vault (docs/connect-pass-eval-2026-10.md): precise over plentiful, so expect few proposals until your vault has real repeats. vir status shows proposed/accepted/awaiting counts. MCP vir_query gains type: "insight".
Use vir from any agent. New Agent Skills skill (npx skills add djolex999/vir) teaches Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other skill-aware agents to check your vir notes before they work. It uses the MCP server when registered (with synthesize: false, so no LLM cost), else vir query --json, else the notes folder directly. It is read-only and never runs paid commands unless asked. A test pins every command, flag and MCP tool it names to the real CLI.

0.24.3 — 2026-10-06

Obsidian is optional. vir writes a folder of markdown, and Obsidian is one good way to read it.

vir init asks for a notes folder, not an Obsidian vault. If the usual vault (~/Documents/Obsidian/MyVault) exists it is still the default; otherwise vir suggests ~/notes and offers to create it. Notes land in <folder>/vir/ as before. Existing configs are unchanged.
The articles folder defaults to raw/ inside your notes folder instead of a hard-coded Obsidian path, and the prompt no longer assumes Obsidian Web Clipper.
README: new “Without Obsidian” section. Notes are plain markdown with YAML frontmatter; vir query and the MCP server need no editor, and VS Code (Foam / Markdown Memo) resolves the [[wikilinks]].
Internal: transcript discovery, filtering and parsing now go through a session-source layer (Claude Code is the first source), groundwork for supporting more coding agents. No behavior change: vir run --dry-run, vir projects and vir doctor output is identical before and after.

0.24.2 — 2026-10-05

vir reconcile follows the same rules as vir run, and cost prompts show real numbers.

Reconcile no longer retries what vir run skips. Rows that errored before the transcript and project filters existed (subagent and workflow transcripts, SDK-agent transcripts, sessions from excluded or undecided projects) were still retried, at full cost. Reconcile now applies the same filters and records those rows with their skip reason; they come back if you change the config.
Reconcile tells you when a transcript is gone. Claude Code deletes old transcripts; those rows can’t be retried and are now listed as “transcript gone” instead of “recoverable”. On claude-cli the retry cost reads “quota” instead of “$0”.
A failed reconcile retry counts toward the 3-attempt limit, like a failed vir run, so a session that keeps failing is parked instead of retried on every pass (--force still retries it).
The vir run cost prompt shows a real estimate (“up to $X”, “subscription quota”, or “unknown” for an unpriced model) instead of a fixed “$1–5”.
$EDITOR with arguments works in vir review (e.g. code --wait).
vir run --full also re-processes articles and PDFs.
Very large transcripts are trimmed to fit the model’s context (the start and the end are kept, and the trim is logged), instead of failing every attempt.
Linux home paths are scrubbed like macOS ones before anything is stored.

0.24.1 — 2026-10-05

Four small fixes: an outage no longer crashes the run, and cost and config handling get stricter.

A provider outage no longer crashes vir run. When the preflight probe failed (provider down, expired login), vir reported the outage and then Node killed the process with an extra stack trace in daemon.log. It now exits normally with the outage reported once.
vir sync-claude exits 1 when a CLAUDE.md could not be updated, instead of printing ✗ and exiting 0.
config.json is never readable by others, even briefly. It holds your API keys; it is now written to an owner-only temp file and renamed into place, instead of being written with the default permissions and tightened afterwards.
Spend on a model with no known price is reported as unknown, not $0. With a model vir has no price for on your provider (for example claude-sonnet-5 on Kie), calls were logged as free and vir cost under-reported. They are now counted as “unpriced” calls next to the total, cost prompts say “unknown”, and vir doctor warns about configured models without a price. Add a price under pricing in config.json to have them counted.

0.24.0 — 2026-10-05

Cost, safety and consistency fixes across the CLI, plus two refactors. Nothing here changes what a normal vir run produces; it changes what vir spends, what it can race with, and how much of the code is checked.

vir_query can skip the paid answer. Pass synthesize: false to get only the matching notes. The tool description now tells the agent that synthesis is billed. Default unchanged.
New notes are embedded once, from the same text as every other note. The vector computed while writing a new note used to be dropped (its database row did not exist yet) and the end-of-run sweep embedded the note again from the body only. The write-time vector is now stored, and the sweep and vir embed read the note file so every vector is built from the same text. Existing vectors are untouched until a rewrite or vir embed --force.
provider: claude-cli works under the daemon’s minimal PATH. vir now finds claude on PATH or in the usual install locations (next to the Node running vir, ~/.claude/local, ~/.local/bin, Homebrew, /usr/local), so scheduled runs no longer fail when claude lives outside launchd’s PATH.
No more racing the daemon. Terminal vir review, dedupe, audit (judging), compose and summarize now take the pipeline lock and exit with a clear message while another vir process holds it. Dry runs are unaffected.
Paid checks ask first. vir dedupe (up to 30 calls) and the vir lint contradiction check (up to 20) now confirm before spending; --yes skips the prompt. Without a terminal and without --yes, the paid step is skipped with a note.
CLAUDE.md is written atomically. sync-claude writes a temp file and renames it into place, so a crash can no longer truncate your file, and a symlinked CLAUDE.md stays a symlink.
Rejecting never overwrites an earlier rejected copy of the same note in .rejected/; vir says so instead.
Under the hood: tests and eval/ are type-checked in CI (npm run typecheck:all); vir run and vir reconcile share one session-distill core; the large commands moved out of cli.ts into their own modules.

0.23.3 — 2026-10-05

A skipped re-run no longer hides a note you already had. When a session with a distilled note came back through vir run (a resumed transcript, or --full) and that pass was skipped by the heuristic filter or by low classify confidence, the note was marked skipped. Its file stayed in the vault, but it dropped out of vir query, the MCP server, sync-claude and rewrites, and never came back on its own. vir reconcile could do the same.

The existing note now stays served. The new transcript is recorded as seen, so a low-confidence session is not re-classified (and billed) on every run. A note hidden by a failed re-distill is served again.
Notes already hidden this way are restored automatically the first time 0.23.3 opens the database. Only rows that this bug can produce are touched.

0.23.2 — 2026-10-05

Two vir processes can no longer both hold the pipeline lock. The lock file (~/.vir/vir.lock) was checked and then written in two steps, so a daemon run and a manual vir run starting at the same moment could both take it and distill the same sessions twice.

The lock is created atomically. Exactly one process creates it; the others report that another vir process is running, as before.
Clearing a crashed run’s leftover lock is guarded too. Only one process at a time may remove a stale lock (via a short-lived ~/.vir/vir.lock.reclaim), so a fresh lock is never deleted by mistake. Tested with 8 processes racing on a fresh and on a stale lock: exactly one winner every time.
A stale lock that cannot be removed (for example, a permissions problem) now fails with a clear error instead of being silently overwritten.

0.23.1 — 2026-10-05

A claude-cli quota halt no longer loses articles and PDFs. When vir run hit the subscription limit, the session loop stopped, but the article and PDF phases still ran into the same wall and recorded every new item as processed with an error. Those items were never tried again.

A quota halt now stops the whole run. Project summaries, articles and PDFs are skipped after a halt, and a limit first hit inside the article or PDF phase halts there. Nothing is recorded, so the skipped items are simply new on the next run.
Items lost this way in earlier versions are retried automatically on the next run. An errored article or PDF no longer counts as processed, so no manual step is needed.
Failing items stop retrying after 3 attempts, the same bound sessions have. A changed file starts the count over. Articles and PDFs gain an attempts column (additive migration).

0.23.0 — 2026-09-29

vir review --json: review from the Obsidian plugin. The terminal review loop now has a non-interactive twin with a stable JSON contract, so the Obsidian plugin can list the queue and approve, reject or restore one note without spawning a TTY. The interactive loop is unchanged.

Queue mode. vir review --audited --json prints the notes vir audit flagged, worst first, as {"items":[...],"counts":{"unaudited":n,"stale":n}} (--project filters). Each item carries the note path, session id, title, category, project, verdict and reason; counts says how many notes have no audit yet or a stale one.
Actions. --approve, --reject and --restore with --json act on exactly one note and print the result as JSON. Use the one-token --flag=<path> form so a path starting with - is never read as a flag.
Reject stops serving immediately. --reject moves the note into .rejected/ and calls markRejected, so vir query no longer returns it before the next run.
Path guard. Actions accept only paths inside the category directories (and .rejected/ for restore), and only session notes; anything else, including ../ escapes, fails invalid_args before touching a file.
No racing a run. The three actions take the pipeline lock and fail with busy while a lock-holding run (a normal vir run, vir reconcile, vir audit --apply-rejects) is in progress; vir run --rewrite-only and --dry-run take no lock.
Two new error kinds: busy and not_found, alongside the existing ones. Errors follow the vir query --json contract: empty stdout, one-line error payload on stderr, exit 1.

0.22.1 — 2026-09-28

vir audit --apply-rejects asks only about the notes it will move, and the audit’s rejects were measured before being applied. The one user-facing change is the preview fix; the rest is the note-usefulness eval under eval/, which never ships, and a byte-identical extraction of the query-synthesis prompt (buildSynthesisPrompt) that the eval keys its cache on.

vir audit --apply-rejects previews only what it will move. The confirmation listed and counted every fresh reject, including notes a human had approved, which the move step then skipped (“move 18 notes?” moved 17). The preview now uses the same approved-note check and shows approved notes as “approved, skipped”. The move still re-checks at act time.
Note-usefulness eval, second verdict: FAIL on noise, rejects applied on inspection. A hand check of the first run found one of the 18 rejects was genuinely load-bearing: 208035d9, the only note on pripremi.rs’s legacy email-flag $unset with strict: false, which also had a title that did not match its body. It was approved and retitled “strict-false-unset-migration” (title from the production title prompt). The eval’s reject set now skips human-approved notes, matching exactly what --apply-rejects moves; it had been testing a removal that could never happen. Re-run on the remaining 17 rejects (34 exposed questions): 32 answers unchanged; Δrecall −0.015, CI [−0.037, 0.000], passes (> −0.05); Δcontradiction +0.015, CI [0.000, +0.037], fails (≤ +0.02). Every worse answer in both runs was checked by hand, and none traced to a fact held by a removed note: each came from an unrelated note swapping into the top 8 or from the answer being worded differently. At this sample size answer-wording noise alone can decide the gate, so the 17 rejects were applied on that inspection rather than on a PASS. They are reversible with vir review --restore.
usefulness run --skip-none drops the report-only no-notes arm, which never feeds the gate: about a third fewer answer and grade calls. The run record carries noneArm: false, and the summary prints “full − none recall skipped”.
Note-usefulness eval (eval/usefulness/, never shipped): the first measured verdict on vir audit --apply-rejects is FAIL, narrowly. npm run eval -- usefulness mine|run|show mines real later-session questions and the facts that session established (82 questions from 71 human sessions), answers each with production retrieval and synthesize() against the full vault, the vault with the audit’s 18 fresh rejects removed in a DB copy, and no notes, then grades every fact as stated, missing or contradicted. The grader passed all four probes (oracle recall 1.00, null clean 1.00, negation 1.00, re-grade agreement 0.99). On the 38 exposed questions, removing the rejects left 34 answers unchanged, improved 2 and hurt 2: Δrecall −0.007, 95% CI [−0.053, +0.039], against a bound of > −0.05; Δcontradiction +0.013, CI [0.000, +0.033], against a bound of ≤ +0.02. Both bounds miss, so non-inferiority is not shown. The mean effect is near zero and 38 questions leave a wide interval, so this says “not proven safe”, not “the rejects are useful”. Two rejects did carry facts a later session needed (popis snapshot/backup details, a pripremi.rs migration). Notes overall lift recall by only +0.05 over no notes, CI [+0.02, +0.09]. Run record: ~/.vir/eval/usefulness/runs/2026-09-28T13-04-40-271Z.json (git abe6e8e, reject-set sha256 d0b4c5bc0f6c…).

0.22.0 — 2026-09-26

vir audit and vir review --audited: a model judges the vault, a human still decides. Every served session note is a candidate for keep, verify, merge or reject, one at a time, forever — nothing has ever re-graded the whole vault at once. vir audit batches each project’s notes (~40k chars a batch, so near-duplicates usually share one) and asks models.distill (--model overrides) for a verdict and a one-line reason per note. It only ever writes to the sessions row — it never moves, rejects or merges a note itself.

Verdicts are suggestions, not gates. tasks/lessons.md (2026-09-18) found two model judges “agree on levels and flip a coin on direction” — so vir review --audited walks only the notes with a fresh non-keep verdict, worst first (reject, then merge, then verify), showing the auditor’s reason under each one; the human approves, edits or rejects exactly as in plain vir review (--apply-rejects is the one exception, see below).
State lives on the row, like pruned_at/rejected_at. Five columns — audit_verdict, audit_reason, audit_merge_into, audit_content_hash, audited_at — added the normal additive way. A verdict is stale once the note’s content hash no longer matches; every reader ignores a stale verdict, so no upsert path has to know audits exist. vir audit --all re-audits fresh verdicts anyway.
Skips what a human has already settled. A verified note (verified: true in frontmatter) is never audited — a human verdict outranks a model one. A garbled reply fails only its own batch (exit code 1, the rest keep going); a claude-cli subscription limit halts the whole run, the same as every other LLM path.
--dry-run shows notes, batches and estimated cost with no model call. Cost is recorded under stage audit in cost.log, same chokepoint as every other LLM caller.
vir audit --apply-rejects: the one exception, and only for rejects. It moves notes with a fresh reject verdict straight to .rejected/ — no model call, gated behind the pipeline lock like vir run, and stamps rejected_by: audit so the note reads as machine-, not human-, rejected. keep/verify/merge are untouched; a stale verdict (content hash no longer matches) and an already-occupied .rejected/ destination are both skipped and counted, never overwritten. Fully reversible with vir review --restore <note>. A note you approved in review, or restored after an audit reject, is never moved.
Calibration. On the reference vault (185 notes), the first prompt sent 76% of notes to verify for title and filler polish; after the fix: 65 keep, 85 verify, 14 merge, 21 reject, 0 failed batches, 2% of notes the reference audit kept came back as reject, 45% exact agreement with an Opus audit that could read the repos. A 20-note human sample was agreed 20/20, but by deference to the model rather than an independent check, so it does not confirm the verdicts. --apply-rejects ships anyway because every move asks first (default No) and is undone by vir review --restore. A usefulness eval (does Claude answer project questions better with the note than without) is the planned replacement gate.

0.21.0 — 2026-09-25

vir dedupe merges render like the writer and survive a rewrite. A merged note used to differ from a distilled one, and the next --rewrite-only quietly took parts of it away.

Same output contract as distill. The merge prompt strips both notes’ Related sections before the model sees them, and asks for Summary, What Was Learned and Context only. On conflict the newer note wins, not the higher-confidence one: staleness depends on age. A reply with no ## Summary throws before any file or row changes.
The winner is re-rendered through the writer (rewriteRow, shared with --rewrite-only), so it keeps the Project: / Category: header and gets neighbour-built Related. The loser is archived first, so it can’t be one of those neighbours.
## Archived Duplicates survives rewrites. It lives only in the file, so every rewrite deleted it, and vir prune stopped protecting merge winners. write() now carries it over. On the reference vault, the vault’s backup git history gave the exact winner for 12 archived losers, and those sections were restored by hand.

vir lint --legacy-related [--fix]: content in old Related sections comes back. Before 0.12.0 the distill prompt asked for a ## Related section, and the model often filled it with content, not links: file paths with what lives there, API endpoints, a SQL query. Since 0.12.0 the writer strips stored Related and rebuilds it from embedding neighbours, so every --rewrite-only dropped those bullets from the file. The database still held them.

--fix moves them into ## Details in stored content, in the place Related was, then re-renders the affected notes. Old-style topic names (“Supabase SSR authentication in Next.js API routes”) and bare wikilinks are still dropped. A bullet counts as a topic name only if it is plain words, at most 8 of them, with no code span, path, colon, dash separator, parentheses, second sentence or verb of assertion. A dropped claim can’t be recovered, but a kept topic name only costs a line.
Stored content, not the writer. Every writer version renders ## Details, and vir dedupe strips Related from the notes it merges, so fixing only the rendering would still lose the content on a merge. Pruned and rejected rows are migrated too, so a restore brings back the migrated text. Archived dedupe losers are left alone, since nothing renders them.
Idempotent. A migrated row has no Related section, so a second pass selects nothing. --fix holds the pipeline lock. It clears each migrated row’s embedding, because the embedded text now includes Details. The rewrite re-embeds, and the sweep back-fills anything it couldn’t.
Reference vault: 340 of 430 stored notes carried a Related section, and 336 of them held content: 1313 bullets kept, 146 topic names dropped. All 340 were migrated and 129 serving notes re-rendered, with no files added or removed. A second pass finds nothing.

0.20.0 — 2026-09-25

A note rejected in vir review stops being served. Review rejected by moving the file into .rejected/, and SQL cannot see where a file is. The row kept serving every read path built on the database: listDistilled (and so sync-claude, summaries, vir_recent_notes, dedupe and lint), getStats and vir status, and the embedding sweep. It dropped out of search only by accident, because the moved file read as empty content.

rejected_at on the sessions row, the same shape as pruned_at. The row keeps its content and stays processed, so nothing is re-distilled or re-billed. Every serving query now carries one gate for both states (servingGate()). Each clause is only added when its column exists, so the read-only MCP server works on a database that hasn’t been migrated.
Backfilled from the files. vir run and vir review sync every note in .rejected/ that carries a rejected_at stamp into the database. Notes vir prune moved there carry no such stamp and keep their own state.
Rows are matched on the full session id, never the 8-character filename suffix. Ids are UUIDs or agent-<hex>, which 785 rows in the reference DB use; anything outside that alphabet selects nothing, so a hand-edited frontmatter can’t slip a LIKE wildcard in.
vir review --restore <note> moves one rejected note back, removes its stamp and puts its row back on every read path. It refuses to overwrite a note already at the destination.
Reference vault: a 2026-09-25 audit rejected 116 notes. vir status still counted 296 notes against 180 files. After the sync it counts 180.

Notes record which git branches their session ran on. Each line of a Claude Code transcript carries gitBranch. The parser now collects them in first-seen order and the writer emits a branches: list in frontmatter. Detached HEAD is skipped, and the key is left out when the transcript has none.

Why now, with nothing reading it yet. A 2026-09-25 vault audit found notes describing work that never left its branch as if it were live (4 of 25 on the current prompt). Whether a branch merged can only be known later, and 69% of 291 recent sessions ran off main, so writing “on branch X” into the note would be wrong most of the time within a week. A later check can compare this field against the repo. The field has to be captured now: Claude Code deletes transcripts after about 30 days, and what isn’t recorded then can’t be backfilled.
--rewrite-only keeps the block. A rewrite has no transcript, so it carries the existing branches: list over, the same way it keeps themes:.
No LLM change. The distill prompt, classify and cost are unchanged.

A note is titled from the note. The topic, which becomes the filename, the alias and the title shown in every retrieval result, used to come from classify. Classify reads the session’s raw summary before the note exists, and on the 09-18 prompt 10 of 25 titles no longer matched the note they headed: offline-backup-in-separate-database on a note about trademark research, authentic-storytelling-beats-polished-copy on an idle-shortcut bug. A cheap classify-model call now names the finished note, and its title replaces classify’s.

Blind-judged before shipping. An Opus judge, shown only the note body and the two titles in random order, preferred the new title on 23 of 25 current-prompt notes, and on 7 of the 8 the vault audit had flagged. A variant that added “in English” and “name the specific thing” tied it 13-12 and drifted onto side bullets, so it was not kept.
A failed naming call never costs the note. The distill has already been paid for, so an unusable reply or a failed call keeps classify’s topic, with a warning. A subscription limit still propagates, so the run loop halts on it as before.
Cost: one classify-model call per distilled note, about 900 tokens in and 40 out. It is logged as stage retitle in cost.log and included in the vir run --dry-run estimate. Classify still decides the category, project and confidence, and the eval harness, which calls classify and distill directly, is unaffected.

vir lint --strays --fix. The stray check can now clean up what it finds. It moves retitle-duplicate strays into archived/ and drops their index.md rows. Retrieval already skips that directory, and a move can be undone by hand.

Only retitle duplicates move. They are the one kind where a live sibling proves nothing unique is lost. An unknown stray may be the only copy of its text. A pruned leftover belongs to prune’s .rejected/ bookkeeping, which --restore reads by exact name. Both are reported and left where they are.
It holds the pipeline lock. A concurrent vir run may be rewriting the same session’s note, so --fix refuses to run while the lock is held.
It never overwrites. A basename already in archived/ (from dedupe or an earlier demotion) gets a -1 suffix instead.
Reference vault: 32 strays moved, 0 left. They were about a tenth of the 337 live notes a 2026-09-25 audit graded, and they are the source of its “one session split into several notes” finding.

0.19.0 — 2026-09-25

macOS notifications come from vir, not Script Editor.

They used to say “Script Editor”. osascript display notification is attributed to Script Editor, with its icon, and there was no way to tell vir’s banners apart or to silence them without silencing Script Editor.
Now a bundled helper app posts them. Vir.app (bundle id dev.vir.app, source in native/notifier/) shows as vir with the vir icon, and gets its own entry in System Settings → Notifications. It ships prebuilt: a universal, ad-hoc-signed binary, so installing needs no Swift toolchain. On first use it is copied to ~/.vir/Vir.app and registered with LaunchServices.
macOS asks once. vir init shows the Allow prompt at the end of setup, and the new vir notifications command shows it on demand, then sends a test banner. The daemon never prompts: macOS counts a prompt that nobody answers as a denial. Until notifications are allowed, vir falls back to osascript as before.
vir doctor has a new notifications row (macOS, when notifications is on). It shows allowed, not set up, blocked (with where to fix it), or helper unavailable.

0.18.2 — 2026-09-24

A failed provider preflight now reaches you. One fix.

A logged-out daemon was silent. The preflight probe aborts a run before the distill loop, so it records no per-session error rows. That part is deliberate: one outage is one fact, not N session failures. But it also meant the distill-failures notification and doctor row never fired. From 2026-09-23 every daemon run died on Failed to authenticate: OAuth session expired, and the only trace was a stack trace in daemon.log.
Now a failed preflight on a daemon run sends one desktop notification naming the provider and the error. For a logged-out claude-cli it says what to do: run claude and /login. notifications: false silences it; interactive runs already print the error and don’t notify.
vir doctor has a new provider preflight row. Each failure is kept in ~/.vir/provider-preflight.failed and cleared by the next successful probe. A failure from the last 2 days is a fail, an older one a warning. It sits apart from provider auth because that row pings from your shell, while this one reports what the last real run saw.
Retry and attempt-counter behaviour is unchanged.

0.18.1 — 2026-09-23

vir reconcile restores a note whose transcript is gone. One fix.

A good note could stay hidden forever. A session that distilled cleanly, then failed a later re-distill, keeps its content and gains an error, and listDistilled hides any row with an error. Once Claude Code pruned the transcript, reconcile’s only move was to clear that stale error, and it never did: the loop skipped every target with a missing file before reaching the branch that restores it. The restore now runs first. Surviving content is restored and counted as recovered; a row with no content is still reported as a missing file.
Reported by kantorcodes1 on r/ClaudeCode, who found it by reading the code. The case is now a test.

0.18.0 — 2026-09-18

The distill prompt now writes for both of a note’s readers. A blind A/B on 15 real transcripts (eval/distill/, never shipped) found the notes have two readers with opposite needs: the human skimming a month later wanted the opening to say what the session was (14 of 15 forced choices), and a model standing in for a retrieving session wanted state and specifics first (14 of 15, same test, both side orders). The new prompt asks for both, in that order, and passed a rule fixed before any output existed: the human no longer preferred the old prompt (8 to 7) and the model preferred the new one (10 to 1 on full notes, p = 0.012).

Summary, sentence one: what the session was, in plain words. Sentence two: the single most important thing it established, with the file, function, command, number or constraint that carries it.
Decisions say what was chosen and what it was chosen over. Context stops repeating the project, category and date already in frontmatter.
“You are writing a page about the session, not replying to it.” A longer experimental prompt once made Haiku echo a session’s closing chat message instead of writing a note; this line is the guard, and the failure did not recur across the test set.
Distill output cap 1500 → 2500 tokens. Notes under this prompt average about 540 words, and the old cap was already cutting 550-590-word notes mid-sentence on the API path. Worst-case added cost is about $0.015 per note.
The prompt text lives in one exported function, buildDistillPrompt, pinned byte-for-byte to the tested file by a test. The output contract is unchanged (marker-less body, same three headings, no Related section, title still from classify), so nothing downstream moves.
Existing notes are untouched. Only new distills get the new shape; most old transcripts are gone, so there is no backfill. A --full run re-distills the few sessions whose transcripts still exist.

Honest limits: one human grader, note tops only, 15 transcripts; the model judge is the same family as the distiller, so its verdict is a preview, not verification.

0.17.8 — 2026-09-11

Distill failures are now visible while they can still be fixed. vir run already recorded an error row per failed session and logged it — correct, and also invisible, because the daemon is unattended and nobody reads daemon.log. In the vault this was built against, 14 sessions died in one fetch failed window on 2026-06-11 and were found three months later, by which time Claude Code had deleted the transcripts and the knowledge was gone. 27 such rows exist there and not one is recoverable.

A desktop notification at the end of any run that errored, mirroring the existing projects-awaiting-decision notice. This is the half that reaches you the same day, while vir reconcile can still act. Respects notifications: false.
A distill failures row in vir doctor carrying the standing state: how many failed, how many are still recoverable, the date of the last one, and the worst single day — because a cluster is the signal. 15 failures in one afternoon is an outage; 15 across a quarter is noise.
Severity keys on recoverability, not count. Recoverable means the transcript still exists on disk, which is the only thing reconcile can act on: fail inside the ~7-day window, warn when older but still retryable, and ok once the transcripts have expired. A permanent red row for work nobody can do teaches people to ignore the whole table, so an expired backlog is reported as a fact with no call to action.
Human table only; the 8-field doctor --json contract is unchanged.

0.17.7 — 2026-09-11

vir lint --strays. Finds note files that no live database row can account for — pre-0.17.3 retitle debris, 32 of them in the reference vault (one session accounts for five). Reporting only; nothing is moved or deleted.

Strays are retrievable, which is why this matters. The embedding path never surfaces them: getEmbeddings builds each note’s path from its CURRENT topic, so a stale slug never resolves. But the TF-IDF walk indexes every category dir — it skips only summaries, .rejected and archived — so whenever the embedder is down, one session can be cited twice under two titles and take two slots in the same top-k. That is observable in this vault’s own query log.
The check asks whether ANY non-pruned row can produce a filename, and deliberately ignores the content column. A session awaiting vir reconcile has empty content while its file on disk holds the only copy of the text, so a content-based test reports a live note as debris. The one-off script written for this cleanup did exactly that and would have demoted a real note; the case is now a test.
Strays are classified, not just counted. retitle-duplicate (a live sibling shares the session id, so nothing unique is in the file, and the report names it), pruned-leftover (the demoted copy belongs in .rejected/), and unknown (no row at all — reported with no recommendation and flagged as possibly the only copy).
vir lint --strays runs the check alone; a bare vir lint includes it.
A flaky test of our own, fixed. writer.related.test asserted “no embedding provider” by relying on Ollama being absent from the machine, and broke the moment Ollama was running — the exact machine-dependent assertion the providerOverride seam exists to prevent. It now sets embeddingProvider: "none" explicitly.

0.17.6 — 2026-09-11

A rewrite with no embedder no longer wipes every Related section. One fix, on the path you reach for straight after vir prune --apply.

vir run --rewrite-only with no embedding provider used to strip the Related section from every note in the vault, silently. neighborLinks needs a vector; without a provider computeNoteEmbedding returns null, the writer computed ZERO neighbours, and zero neighbours renders identically to a note that genuinely has none. The self-heal sweep does not undo it — it stores embeddings, it does not rewrite notes — so the loss persisted until another rewrite with a working provider. write() now falls back to preservedRelatedSection (the existing block, verbatim) whenever there is no vector, mirroring preservedThemesBlock. A rewrite without an embedder is a no-op for links instead of a wipe.
Dangling wikilinks after a prune are cleared by regenerating, never by editing notes. neighborLinks reads db.getEmbeddings, which the prune gate filters, so a pruned note disappears from every Related section on the next vir run --rewrite-only — by construction, now pinned by a test. The consequence of the fix above is worth stating: clearing dangling links REQUIRES a working embedding provider. With one down the rewrite preserves them, which is the safe failure but not the fix.

0.17.5 — 2026-09-11

vir prune. 0.14.0’s agent-transcript filters are forward-only, so every note distilled before them is still in the vault, the embedding pool, TF-IDF and all six MCP tools. This demotes them. Dry run is the default; nothing is ever deleted.

vir prune reports what it would demote, per reason, and exits. --apply moves each note to .rejected/ and marks its row; --restore puts every pruned note back byte-for-byte. On the vault this was built against: 132 candidates (129 sidechain, 3 workflow), 278 kept.
Prune state is DB-authoritative — pruned_at + prune_reason on the sessions row. Deliberately NOT skipped: flipping that on a row holding a note is the 0.14.0 semi-prune. And deliberately not frontmatter, which is invisible to SQL — the reason vir review’s .rejected/ move leaks through eight DB-backed read paths today (listDistilled and everything downstream, getStats, the embedding sweep). Every serving query now carries prunedGate(), which is a no-op on a DB whose migration has not run, so the read-only MCP path still opens an un-migrated database.
Gated at the paid boundary. --full bypasses isProcessed, so without a gate in the run loop it re-classifies and re-distills every pruned session and only discovers at write() that the note is demoted — billing you on every run, forever. The check sits beside the retry bound, which has the same “even under –full” reasoning.
Classification is pure and zero-I/O. 396 of 411 distilled transcripts no longer exist on disk (Claude Code prunes at ~30 days), and entrypoint was never backfilled — NULL on 376 of 411 rows — so the stored path does the work: subagents/ yields sidechain, wf_/workflows yields workflow, and a stored sdk* entrypoint yields agent. The launcher traps hold by construction: the classifier reads entrypoint only, never promptSource (which reads “sdk” on desktop-launched human sessions) and never turn count (which would kill single-prompt autonomous runs).
Two buckets are reported and never pruned. unclassifiable (no entrypoint, transcript gone — 231 rows) and merge-winner (dedupe records no parentage, so a winner cannot be shown to be all-agent — 12 rows). A prune that guesses is a delete with extra steps.
--restore is exact. A pruned row keeps its content, embedding and hash; the note is stamped with prune’s own frontmatter keys, never review’s rejected_at, so a note that is both rejected and pruned restores cleanly.
Kept notes are never edited. Dangling wikilinks pointing at pruned notes are counted and reported (177 on the reference vault), never rewritten.
vir doctor gains a human-table row with pruned counts per reason and the restore hint. The 8-field doctor --json contract is unchanged.
CATEGORY_DIR is exported from writer.ts rather than re-declared.

0.17.4 — 2026-09-11

Four findings from the July audit backlog. Two of them lose data; two lie quietly. No new surface.

A garbled classify response no longer buries a session forever. parseClassification folded an unparseable response into a confidence-0 verdict, which run.ts recorded as skipped: true with the current hash — and vir reconcile only targets skipped = 0. One transient formatting glitch dropped that session’s knowledge with no recovery path, indistinguishable from a session the model had genuinely judged dull. The two now diverge where the distinction exists: the fallback branches are marked unparsed and run() throws ClassifyParseError, which the existing handler routes through recordError (skipped = 0, error set, attempts + 1). The session becomes a reconcile target and MAX_DISTILL_ATTEMPTS bounds it at 3 consecutive failures. A real low-confidence verdict is untouched — that one is an answer, not an accident. (bug-hunt #17)
vir sync-claude no longer mangles a hand-edited CLAUDE.md. Both markers were matched with a bare first-indexOf, no ordering or balance check, against a file the user edits by hand. An orphan VIR:START failed the guard and a SECOND block was appended — and the next sync then sliced from the orphan to the new block’s END, deleting every line written between them (the deletion is armed by one sync and sprung by the next). END before START duplicated the region between them; a second complete block was left behind forever; and markers inside a fenced code block counted as real, so a CLAUDE.md that DOCUMENTS vir’s markers got edited at the example. Markers are now located fence-aware and paired forward into complete blocks; unbalanced markers are refused with a reason and nothing is written, because appending was what armed the deletion. applyPlan returns { ok, reason } and vir sync-claude prints it. (bug-hunt #13)
A config.pricing override for an unknown model no longer logs $0. resolvePricing returned null as soon as the model was absent from DEFAULT_PRICING, before overrides were consulted — so an override for a model id newer than the table, which is exactly what the override exists for, priced the run at $0 silently. Only a COMPLETE override stands alone: with no base to patch, half a price is a wrong price. (bug-hunt #14)
MCP stops telling clients three untrue things. It announced version: "0.1.1", a literal untouched since the first release — now readVirVersion(), with a test asserting the initialiser carries no literal at all. vir mcp install advertised 4 tools while the server registers 6; both sides now read one VIR_TOOLS list, pinned by a test that scans the server’s own registerTool calls, so a new tool cannot ship half-announced. And getStats() names six migration-added columns while the read-only MCP path deliberately skips migrations, so on an upgraded-but-never-written DB vir_status died with no such column: category; it now degrades to empty stats. (bug-hunt #19)

0.17.3 — 2026-09-11

A note is identified by its session, not by its title. Completes the 0.17.2 fix, which only covered half the cases. Includes everything in 0.17.2, which was tagged but never published.

A retitle no longer loses the review verdict or forks a duplicate. A note’s path is makeSlug(topic, sessionId) — built from the topic, which the distiller changes between runs on purpose (0.9.1 retitles deliberately). The path was therefore never identity. Every consumer that recomputed it from the current topic missed the note it meant to update: preservedReviewFields() read the new path, so verified / reviewed_at and the +0.2 retrieval boost were dropped; the old note stayed behind as a duplicate; and the 0.17.2 .rejected/ guard keyed off the current slug too, so a retitled note came back rejected-no-more. Three symptoms, one cause. (bug-hunt #12, finishing #9)
locateBySession() indexes the vault by the filename’s session suffix, built once per writer and kept current as notes are written — a rescan per note would be O(n²) on a vault with thousands. .rejected/ is scanned last so it wins: a rejection is the authoritative location for its session. A stale hit (a note vir review moved between runs) triggers one rebuild; a miss never does, so a batch of new notes doesn’t rescan per note.
The suffix is an index hint; the full id is the authority. makeSlug truncates the session id to 8 characters, so two sessions can share a filename suffix — and a match authorises deleting the old file. Every hit is confirmed against the session_id in frontmatter before it is used. A collision degrades to an orphaned duplicate, never a deletion. (The first draft of this patch resolved on the suffix alone and deleted the colliding note; the collision test caught it.)
write() retires what it replaces — on a retitle the old file is removed and its index.md row dropped, since append mode never regenerates the index.
archived/ is deliberately not indexed. A dedupe-merged note being re-created by a re-distill is the same shape of problem, but what a merge should mean for the loser’s session is a product decision, not a refactor — it gets its own.

0.17.2 — 2026-09-11

Rejection sticks. vir review rejections survive a --full re-distill. No other behavior changes.

A rejected note no longer comes back. vir review rejects by moving the note into .rejected/, which left the category path empty — so preservedReviewFields(), which carries a verdict across a rewrite by reading the destination path, found nothing and a re-distill wrote the note straight back as if it had never been rejected. rejected_at was in that function’s keep-list the whole time; it just never had a file to be read from. write() now checks .rejected/<slug>.md first and returns that path untouched when it exists: the slug is makeSlug(topic, sessionId), so a re-distill of the same session resolves to the same filename and the check is exact, not a heuristic. The embedding call and the index and log appends are skipped for a note nobody wants. vir reconcile and rewrite-only runs share write(), so one guard covers all three paths. (#9)
REJECTED_DIR has one definition, in writer.ts, imported by review.ts. The literal was declared in both files — the same drift that produced the slug-helper bug (bug-hunt #1), caught before it could bite twice.

0.17.1 — 2026-09-04

Website and brand. No CLI behavior changes.

virwiki.dev. Single-page site in site/ (Astro, Preact islands, static on Vercel): live graph of a real vault sample laid out at build time, the note anatomy with the exact writer.ts frontmatter, measured numbers instead of a benchmark, cost stated up front, dark mode.
New mark. The graph-spiral logo replaces the whirlpool across README, the npm package asset, the site, and the Obsidian plugin (vir-obsidian 0.2.2 ships the matching ribbon icon).
README numbers re-measured: 534 tests, 396 rescued sessions, 1,386 → 410 transcripts-to-notes.

0.17.0 — 2026-08-13

New distill provider: your Claude Code subscription. provider: "claude-cli" shells out to the installed claude binary in print mode — zero per-session dollars, zero credentials. The API path (anthropic) stays the default for new and existing installs; this ships as an option until it has real mileage. Existing configs are untouched.

claude-cli provider behind the existing callLLM seam, alongside anthropic and kie. Spawns claude -p with arg arrays (never a shell string), prompt on stdin, JSON envelope out, per-invocation --model pinning — hybrid routing survives. Two structural correctness requirements, enforced by tests rather than convention: --no-session-persistence always (vir never writes transcripts into ~/.claude/projects — no self-scanning, no disk bloat) and a fixed neutral spawn cwd (~/.vir, so no project’s CLAUDE.md can leak into distill context). Neither has a config path that could omit it.
Subscription limits are a wall, not a 429. A detected limit (ClaudeCliLimitError) is never retried, halts vir run and vir reconcile with one message carrying the reset time, and burns no per-session attempt counters — one environmental fact, not N failures (the preflight-probe lesson). The detection regex is docs-sourced and honestly labeled UNVERIFIED: any unrecognized error envelope is written raw to daemon.log once per run as evidence, unknown errors fail safe (no retry chains), the first real match stamps ~/.vir/claude-cli-limit.confirmed, and a new vir doctor “limit detection” row reports whether the pattern has ever been confirmed.
Batch cap: 25 sessions per run on claude-cli only. Subscription quota has no meter, so a big backlog is bounded per cycle (~50 CLI calls ≈ one heavy interactive session); the cap is stated before the loop starts and the deferred remainder is reported and picked up next run. API providers are never capped.
Cost honesty. claude-cli calls land in cost.log with estimated_cost_usd: null — cost not-applicable, never a fake $0.00 that would corrupt dollar aggregates. vir cost reports them as a separate subscription-calls count, excluded from total/median/p90; dry-run estimates label “subscription quota (no $)”.
vir init presents the choice honestly, one line each: API key = predictable per-session cost, no effect on Claude Code limits; subscription = free and keyless, consumes your Claude Code usage limits. claude-cli asks for no key. vir doctor authenticates it with the existing claude-CLI detector plus a live ping.
Re-init key survival is now enforced by schema enumeration. buildInitConfig had silently dropped a config key three times (bug #5, the projects map, logQueries); a new test enumerates ConfigSchema itself, so any future key must declare a survival sample and be carried over — by construction, not by remembering. The test immediately caught a FOURTH live drop: embeddingProvider (never carried since 0.15.0 — a configured provider silently reset to auto-detect on re-init). Fixed.

0.16.0 — 2026-08-13

Retrieval logging. Every vir query and MCP vir_query retrieval now appends one record to a local, append-only ~/.vir/queries.jsonl — which notes surfaced, at what rank and score, by which method, and how fast. The log is the ground truth for which notes earn their place in retrieval, and the baseline for future ranking work. Local-only, never transmitted; the synthesized answer is never recorded. Additive release: ranking, thresholds, and retrieval behavior are unchanged.

Query log (~/.vir/queries.jsonl, JSONL, not SQLite — the read-only MCP facade must never write the DB, and file appends don’t contend with the daemon’s SQLite lock). One record per query, written after retrieval resolves and before synthesis: timestamp, source (cli/mcp), query text, type filter, method (embedding/tfidf), degraded flag + reason, provider provenance (name/model/dim, null on tfidf), candidate count above the floor, model-mismatch exclusions, search latency, and per-hit {slug, rank, score, verified} — verified per hit is how the flat +0.2 VERIFIED_BOOST eventually gets calibrated instead of guessed.
Best-effort, never silent. A log write failure can never fail a query (outer guard, unit-tested), but it emits one stderr line (stderr only — MCP stdout is the JSON-RPC channel) and stamps ~/.vir/queries.failed, which the new vir doctor “query log” check surfaces when a failure post-dates the last successful write within 7 days. Human table only; the 8-field doctor --json contract is unchanged.
Rotation. The log caps at 5 MB; at the cap it rolls to queries.jsonl.1 (one generation kept, ~10 MB bound total). Readers merge both generations in order.
vir queries (+ --json). The payoff: total queries, method split, degraded rate, most-surfaced notes with mean rank, and the dead-weight list — notes that never surfaced in any logged query, the prune target. Dead weight is suppressed (JSON: null, never []) below 20 logged queries: with a small sample “never surfaced” means unasked, not unused, and the report refuses to dress noise as signal.
Config: logQueries (default true). Documented in the README: logged locally, never transmitted, delete anytime, "logQueries": false to disable.
SearchOutcome gained candidates and provider provenance fields (additive, telemetry-only — never a ranking input).

0.15.0 — 2026-07-31

Embeddings are now optional and provider-agnostic. A new user needs only an API key: semantic search activates on demand, and keyword search is a supported floor, never an error state. Schema migration (additive), a new provider, and new command surface.

Embedding model provenance. Every embedding row stores the model and dimension that produced it (embedding_model / embedding_dim on all four tables; additive migration, existing rows backfill to nomic-embed-text/768). Retrieval refuses to compare vectors from different models — cosine across incompatible geometries is confident nonsense — and reports the excluded count instead of silently mixing them.
EmbeddingProvider interface (embedDoc/embedQuery, modelName, dimensions, maxInputChars). Ollama is now one implementation, not the assumption.
Local provider: vir embed --setup. Installs fastembed + bge-small-en-v1.5 (384d) into ~/.vir/embedder on demand — never a package dependency (the CLI tarball stays ~212 kB). States the disk cost (~233 MB + ~128 MB model) and asks before touching disk or network. No node-gyp, no build step, ~190 ms cold start.
Provider resolution: configured (embeddingProvider in config, optional)

Ollama detected > local installed > none. vir init asks no embedding question; when nothing resolves, vir run prints a one-line offer once per run and continues on keyword search.
Per-model similarity thresholds (RELATED_MIN_SIM, the candidate floor) moved into a per-model table. bge values calibrated against a real 389-note vault by quantile-matching nomic’s floors (doc-doc distributions are near-identical across the two models; bge query scores run ~0.15 hotter).
Honest labeling. via: tfidf (no provider) is distinct from via: tfidf (embeddings failed) — different states, different fixes. vir doctor reports the active provider, model, dimension, alternatives with their costs, and the count of notes embedded under a different model (non-zero means an unfinished migration; vir embed --force finishes it).
Model-boundary re-embeds require consent. vir embed --force across a model boundary states the note count and estimated time first; plain vir embed fills same-model gaps only. The index stays queryable at every point mid-migration.
Context-limit fix. Ollama serves nomic at num_ctx 2048; notes over ~8k chars used to 500 and silently NULL their embedding forever. embedText now truncates at the model limit (recorded, not silent) with reactive halving, and EmbedderError carries a typed kind (context-limit / http / network) so daemon.log distinguishes a too-big note from a down Ollama.
TF-IDF idf smoothing (log(1 + N/df)): a single-note vault can now find its own note (bare log(N/df) zeroed every term when df = N). Established-vault rankings shift minimally (top-3 changes limited to adjacent swaps on a 412-note corpus).
OLLAMA_HOST env var overrides the Ollama base URL (Ollama’s own convention).

0.14.0 — 2026-07-31

Project-level and transcript-category distillation filtering. Every filter gates at the SCAN phase — before the paid classify call — and every skip records a DB row with its reason; never a silent omission.

Per-project decisions (projects config map, three-state: include / exclude / absent = undecided). Undecided sessions record project-pending and wait; the daemon never prompts (macOS notification instead, behind the new notifications flag); interactive vir run and vir init triage via a multi-select showing session counts and rough costs. Multi-select defaults to over-capture (undecided starts checked) — transcripts prune at ~30 days, so a wrong exclude is permanent.
vir projects: per-project table (decision, sessions, distilled, pending, excluded, est. pending cost), include|exclude <name>, --json.
Project identity decoded from transcript dir names by longest match against real on-disk directories (handles dashed names, dots, deleted cwds; falls back to the raw dir name, never guesses).
Nested workflow/subagent transcripts (subagents/…, wf_*) are agent-internal execution, excluded by default (workflowTranscripts), with distinct workflow-transcript / sidechain-transcript skip reasons.
Top-level SDK-launched harness agents (review/verify transcripts — first user line’s entrypoint starts with "sdk") excluded by default under their own agentTranscripts key and agent-transcript reason; detected entrypoint persisted per session; doctor reports counts by entrypoint. On the audited machine these were 67 of 97 top-level transcripts.
All filter skips are reversible (flipping a decision or knob re-enters the transcripts) and forward-only (a row holding a distilled note is never overwritten — existing notes stay retrievable).
One-off run scoping: vir run --only <p> / --exclude-project <p> (repeatable, never persisted).
vir doctor: warns on undecided projects (with oldest-transcript age and the ~30-day prune deadline); informational agent-transcript line.
Default provider is now anthropic + claude-sonnet-5 (Kie stays fully supported; existing kie configs untouched, one-line notice on interactive runs). Provider preflight probe makes an outage one clear failure instead of N retry chains.
vir init masks API-key input and echoes only a masked confirmation.
New dep: @inquirer/checkbox (the multi-select). Additive DB migrations: skip_reason, entrypoint.

0.13.0 — 2026-07-30

Retry bound: 3 consecutive failed distills park a session (new sessions.attempts column, reset on success) — vir run skips it even under --full; vir reconcile --force is the only way back in.
Process lock: ~/.vir/vir.lock pidfile with stale-PID reclaim serializes distiller-calling commands; a second vir run/vir reconcile exits immediately with the holder PID instead of double-spending.
vir schedule install no longer starts a paid run (RunAtLoad is now false); new --run-now flag opts into an immediate first tick.
vir doctor backup-freshness check (renders only when ~/.vir/backup.sh exists): warns when the last successful backup is older than 48h.

Earlier releases (≤ 0.12.0) are documented in their annotated git tags and commit messages (git log --oneline --decorate).

0.12.1 — 2026-07-30

Bug-fix release: eight fixes, all TDD (RED → GREEN), one commit each.

vir run --rewrite-only --dry-run no longer rewrites the vault under the dry-run banner — it reports the would-rewrite count and exits before any write or index regeneration.
Network-level fetch failures (TypeError with an error cause — undici’s ECONNREFUSED/ENOTFOUND/socket-reset shape) are now retryable on the Kie path; previously they burned zero retries (30 of 41 backlog rows).
vir doctor’s Ollama check performs a one-shot embedding probe instead of a reachability ping; --json’s ollama.model is the probe result (null when embedding fails), never an echoed constant.
Embedding failures during vir query degrade to TF-IDF loudly: the error is surfaced, the result set is marked degraded, and the via: label reflects what actually served the results.
A failed re-distill no longer records the transcript hash (hash = success marker), so changed transcripts stay eligible for vir run; the reconcile selector also claims error rows with surviving content (rescuing rows already orphaned) and restores the last good note when the source transcript is gone.
vir doctor distinguishes daemon “not installed” from “installed but not running” — and the latter no longer reports ok.
The TF-IDF fallback walk skips .rejected/ and archived/, so human-rejected and dedupe-archived notes can never resurface via vir query / MCP vir_query.
docs/bug-hunt-2026-07.md re-verified: 6 findings marked resolved with source refs, 3 marked not-re-verified.