Changelog

Plugin versions, newest first. Skill-level changes are in each skill's CHANGELOG.md; the session log is ai-docs/log.md.

0.3.3 · 2026-10-06

• Ready for GitHub Copilot CLI and the awesome-copilot marketplace: a root plugin.json (Agent Plugins 1.0), and each skill now links its own copy of the kb/ files it uses (references/kb/), because Agent Skills linters reject links that leave the skill folder. kb/ stays the one to edit; python scripts/sync-skill-refs.py rewrites the copies and --check (run by the test suite) fails when one drifts.
• Prepared for the Claude plugin directory: README Privacy section (every host class the CLI contacts, what each request carries, no credentials read, no posting), plugin.json homepage, documentationUrl, supportUrl and privacyPolicyUrl. Two skill references reworded ("add --override", "give new-note the options") so the directory scanner does not read "pass" as the password manager.
• New built-in beat personal-sites (how tech and design people think about and build personal and professional websites and blogs): 34 sources (10 subreddits, 3 Hacker News queries, 9 feeds including IndieNews, Smashing, Typewolf, Dave Rupert, Jeremy Keith, Josh Comeau and Maggie Appleton, 3 Google News queries, 4 Mastodon tags, 4 hand-read galleries), 60 entities in 5 facets, 21 question seeds, an 11-chapter study outline, 2 candidate metrics. Probed clean on 2026-09-27. Built to refresh Mark's site and to seed a personal-site design skill.
• personal-sites: AI and visual design merged in rather than a separate beat (same communities): research question 7, an "AI and design" vocabulary facet (18 entities), 9 sources (r/vibecoding, HN "AI slop" and "vibe coded", Sidebar, UX Collective, Awwwards blog, Creative Bloq, Google News, avoid-ai-design), 4 question seeds, 4 searches, study chapter 04b.

0.3.2 · 2026-09-27

• because: Mark said yes to two candidates while GDELT was cooling down and they had no points, so the yes had to wait in a handoff note.
• Pre-approved promotion: stats approve --beat B METRIC [--withdraw] stamps an optional approved column in metrics.md (old catalogs stay valid). stats collect, stats review and approve itself promote an approved candidate once it meets the normal rule (3 points at C3 or better), print promoted X (pre-approved <date>) and log it. Unapproved candidates are still only proposed. beat-check validates the date. kb/SCHEMA.md, kb/stats.md, scan skill and report reference updated. 49 offline tests.

0.3.1 · 2026-09-27

• because: GDELT answered 429 all through the 0.3.0 session and to a single probe 10 minutes after the last call; its only published limit is "one request every 5 seconds" in the refusal text, and reports show blocks lasting much longer (ai-docs/solutions/2026-09-27-gdelt-rate-limit.md).
• GDELT gap raised from 6 s to 10 s between completed calls.
• A GDELT refusal starts a cool-down in LOCAL/cooldown.json (1 h, doubling per refusal in a row, at most 24 h); stats collect skips GDELT metrics until it passes, sends nothing and writes no failed row; a success clears it. New test (46 offline tests).
• tech-hiring: wiki-layoff promoted to active (the user's yes, 8 points).
• kb/platforms.md GDELT row and kb/stats.md updated.

0.3.0 · 2026-09-27

Beat statistics, built from the approved design in ai-docs/research/2026-09-27-beat-statistics.md (section 5).

• because: Mark wants each beat to gather statistics over time, propose and retire metrics, and feed chartwright; the research note found no skill that does the loop and set the schema, storage and lifecycle.
• Metric catalog metrics.md per beat (id, question, definition, unit, kind, source, method, cadence, Admiralty grade, status, version, created, reviewed, archive_reason, headline), validated by beat-check. The template and the four starter beats ship candidates (notes per week, GDELT news volume, Wikipedia pageviews), sources checked live on 2026-09-27.
• Append-only DATA/stats/series.csv (date,metric,version,value,unit,source,note_ref); failed collections are rows with an empty value.
• CLI stats list|add|collect|review|export. Adapters: tally (notes or an entity, count or share), GDELT DOC 2.0 TimelineVol and TimelineVolRaw, Wikimedia pageviews, derived, manual. Network reads go through the paced fetcher with a 60 s timeout (GDELT took 45 s for an OR query on 2026-09-27) and no retries; a refusal is never cached.
• Lifecycle in stats review: promotion after 3 points at grade C3 or better on the user's yes; archive as stale (3 failed periods, or no value for 3 periods), flat (CV under 5% over 8 points), irrelevant, gamed or superseded; never deletes rows; a definition change bumps the version and export splits the series. Thresholds configurable under stats in config.json. Trends and co-movement shown, never acted on.
• stats export writes a chartwright-ready long CSV and, when chartwright is found, prints or builds (--charts) a line chart, sparklines and small multiples into DATA/reports/charts/. Chartwright stays optional.
• Skills: everscout-beat defines metrics, everscout-scan collects, everscout-report reviews and charts, everscout-ask reads the series (procedure in kb/stats.md). beat and report descriptions updated with skill-tidy (check OK).
• kb/SCHEMA.md and kb/platforms.md document the files and the two new sources. 45 offline tests (15 new); root plugin evals 12/12 after the description changes.

0.2.2 · 2026-09-26

• The five skill descriptions shortened with skill-tidy so each is under the 1,024-character spec cap (some hosts drop longer ones), under 200 words and at most 12 quoted phrases, with every trigger meaning kept and a boundary sentence naming the siblings. ask 1,415 to 962 chars, beat 1,081 to 926, engage 1,165 to 1,011, report 1,102 to 920, scan 1,096 to 949.
• New evals/ at the plugin root: 12 trigger and decoy cases for claude plugin eval . --ablation none --no-publish --trust-plugin (runs on native Windows); first run 12/12. evals/results/ is ignored.

0.2.1 · 2026-09-26

• followups recognises replies imported without a comment id (matched by time), so a migrated ledger does not collect the same answer twice. Found moving indie-ai-scout onto everscout as the private beat indie-ai-games (its plan and log are in indie-ai-scout's private doc set).

0.2.0 · 2026-09-26

• New skill everscout-ask: interrogate a beat like a reporter. It recalls what the beat's knowledge base holds, grades whether that is enough and fresh (corrective retrieval: enough, partial, none), researches the gaps in the beat's communities, data pages and the web, answers with what the scout had seen, what is new, where sources disagree, confidence and unknowns, and saves the answer under answers/ so the next question starts from it.
• CLI: recall --beat --q ranks notes, answers, reports, study and the journal against a question and prints the signals for the entities it names; index and lint cover answers/; fetch --peek reads without marking items seen; vocabulary aliases also match their plural.
• Tested headless: "Ask my tech-hiring scout: are companies moving interviews back on-site because of AI cheating?" passed 3 of 3 (everscout-ask TESTS.md, T-20260926-1).
• New built-in beat tech-hiring (developer and tech hiring), the first beat built from scratch by everscout-beat: 33 sources (15 subreddits, 5 Hacker News queries, Indeed Hiring Lab, the Pragmatic Engineer, Crunchbase News, Google News, Mastodon, data pages), 49 entities in 5 facets, 27 question seeds, an 11-chapter study outline.

0.1.2 · 2026-09-27

From the second headless test of "set up a scout for ai video generation" (everscout-beat TESTS.md, T-20260927-2, 3 of 3 passed).

• probe --save merges a partial probe into the day's snapshot instead of overwriting it.
• The built-in ai-video beat takes the test run's verified refresh: 46 sources, all answering on 2026-09-27; three GitHub rows moved to commit feeds (the repositories publish no releases); AI film newsletters, a Bluesky feed generator, arXiv and Lemmy added; PixVerse, KlingAI and SeedVR2 in the vocabulary.
• Procedure and platform guide: check releases.atom before adding a GitHub row; prefer arXiv category RSS.

0.1.1 · 2026-09-26

Fixes from the first headless test of "set up a scout for ai video generation" (everscout-beat TESTS.md, T-20260926-1).

• probe checks Reddit through multireddit requests, ten subreddits each, and probes alone only the ones that do not appear.
• everscout-beat waits for the probe instead of ending with it running, and refreshes a matching starter beat with a discovery pass instead of only copying it.

0.1.0 · 2026-09-26

First release. A topic-agnostic scout, generalised from the private indie-ai-scout 0.3.1.

• Beats: a subject is a folder of markdown files (beat.md, sources.md, vocab.md, questions.md, searches.md, study.md). Built-in starter beats ai-video, global-economics, downtempo, and _template. Private beats in ~/.everscout/beats shadow built-in ones.
• Sources, all keyless, checked live on 2026-09-26: Reddit Atom feeds, Hacker News (Algolia), Bluesky (profile RSS, feed generators, threads), Mastodon (tag and account RSS, threads), Lemmy (community RSS, threads), Discourse (latest and category RSS, topics), any RSS or Atom feed, YouTube channel and playlist feeds, GitHub releases, arXiv API, Hugging Face trending models, spaces and daily papers, Google News search. One paced, cached fetcher with a per-host gap, an honest User-Agent, retries on 429, 503 and transient 406.
• Notes with one list field per vocabulary facet, prefilled by alias matching; validate, tally (counts, 30-day velocity, spread, decayed weight, signal new, rising, steady, fading, dormant), index, lint (report and study links resolve; external URLs must be held by a note, a snapshot or the source log), source-log, retention.
• Engagement: candidates, questions, one ledger across beats with per-platform pace rules (engage-check, engage-record, engage-update, ledger, followups). Everscout never posts; the person pastes.
• Knowledge base: kb/conduct.md (a 20-rule conduct code from the engagement-ethics research), kb/platforms.md, kb/method.md (netnography stages, signal rubric, radar rings, faithfulness rules), kb/SCHEMA.md, kb/voice-template.md.
• Four evergreen skills: everscout-beat, everscout-scan, everscout-engage, everscout-report, each with research, changelog, learnings, tests and evals.
• Research notes under ai-docs/research/: platform access, engagement ethics, prior art, sample beats.