> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://honcho.dev/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Changelog
Welcome to the Honcho changelog! This section documents all notable changes to the Honcho API and SDKs.
Each release is documented with:
* **Added**: New features and capabilities
* **Changed**: Modifications to existing functionality
* **Deprecated**: Features that will be removed in future versions
* **Removed**: Features that have been removed
* **Fixed**: Bug fixes and corrections
* **Security**: Security-related improvements
## Version Format
Honcho follows [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/):
* **MAJOR** version for incompatible API changes
* **MINOR** version for backwards-compatible functionality additions
* **PATCH** version for backwards-compatible bug fixes
### Honcho API and SDK Changelogs
### Added
* Scopes: a named grouping of sessions that acts as a visibility boundary on recall, implemented as a facade over an observer peer (`scope.{name}` with `{"kind": "scope"}`). Developers manage them exclusively through `/v3/workspaces/{workspace_id}/scopes` (create-or-get, list, get, add/list/remove session membership) and an optional `scopes` field on session create — never through the observer/observed mechanics. Scope peers cannot author messages, cannot be a chat or representation `target`, are excluded from `peers.list` by default (`PeerGet.kind` = `"scope"` / `"all"` switches the view), and are rejected on the generic session-peer routes. Workspace-level key required; peer- and session-scoped keys get 401. Legacy peers occupying a reserved `scope.` name without the kind flag are refused with 409, never adopted (#884)
* `scope` read option on chat, representation, session context, and workspace search. A single scope swaps the observer to the backing scope peer so conclusion recall, peer cards, and message tools stay inside that scope's membership. A list of scopes takes the union of member sessions (capped at `MAX_SESSION_ALLOWLIST_ENTRIES`) and executes via the session-allowlist path. Empty scopes fail closed. `scope` is mutually exclusive with `filters` and `session_id`. Workspace- or admin-level key required (403 otherwise). Scope peers are also rejected as `peer_target` / `peer_perspective` on session context and as the path peer or `target` on `GET /peers/{id}/context` (#897)
* Scope backfill-by-copy and removal reconciliation. Adding a session that already has messages copies its explicit-level documents into the scope's collections (no LLM re-derivation; idempotent via `copied_from`). Removing a session soft-deletes those copies and fail-closed cascades to derived documents whose `source_ids` intersect anything removed, then enqueues a `card_refresh` dream with `rebuild=True` plus an omni dream. `GET /v3/workspaces/{workspace_id}/scopes/{scope_id}/status` reports per-session backfill state (`pending` / `completed` / `failed`, plus `docs_copied`) (#904)
* Workspace-level chat at `POST /v3/workspaces/{workspace_id}/chat`: agentic dialectic over the whole workspace instead of a single (observer, observed) pair. Prefetches workspace stats and the top active peers' self cards, then searches pair-scoped memory with `[observer->observed]` attribution. Supports `session_id`, `scope`, `reasoning_level`, `response_format`, and SSE streaming (#931)
* MCP workspace discovery: tools accept `workspace_id`, the worker honors an optional `X-Honcho-Workspace-ID` connection header, and `list_workspace` / `create_workspace` tools let clients pick or create a workspace instead of relying on the SDK default (#1020)
* MCP `search` also queries conclusions in parallel with messages when `peer_id` is given, returning `{messages, conclusions}`. The conclusions leg degrades to `[]` on error so search never gets worse than before (#974)
* Prometheus metrics for physical DB connections, visible even under `DB_POOL_CLASS=null`: `db_connections_open` (gauge) and `db_connections_established` (counter), hooked to SQLAlchemy connection-lifecycle events and registered on both the API and the deriver (#1055)
* Bounded-label Prometheus series are zero-initialized at process start so an absent series means a broken scrape rather than "nothing happened" (#927)
### Changed
* Workspace and pair chat system prompts now describe Honcho, peers, and the harness on their own terms, and render only the tools the request actually offers. The pair prompt no longer advertises a write tool that is not in the loadout (#1066)
* Deriver idle polling backoff is longer and no longer reset by periodic reconciler work, so downstream connection pools can cull idle DB connections (#1015)
* LLM provider SDKs are lazy-loaded so idle API and deriver processes no longer pay for every provider at import time (#1011)
* Production image is a multi-stage build: LanceDB/PyArrow move behind an optional `lancedb` extra (`INSTALL_LANCEDB=true` to restore them), FastAPI's unused cloud CLI is dropped, and the venv is copied into the runtime image with final ownership so Docker does not double the layer. Default unpacked image is about 663 MB (was 1.7 GB) (#1014)
* Redis Cluster cache keys hash-tag the namespace so one deployment's keys land on a single shard instead of opening a connection to every node. No behaviour change on a non-cluster backend; existing keys age out by TTL (#1058)
* Deriver extraction prompt no longer leaks its own few-shot examples into extracted conclusions (#1028)
### Fixed
* Observer-scoped `get_observation_context` no longer materializes every session the observer has ever joined into a `session_name IN (...)` list (twice in one statement). Past \~32k sessions that hit psycopg's bind-parameter ceiling and 500'd. The observer half is now a correlated `EXISTS` over `session_peers`, two bind parameters regardless of membership size (#1065)
* Re-adding an already-active session peer no longer advances `joined_at`, so `peer_perspective` search keeps messages from the original join. Genuine leave-and-rejoin still starts a new window (#1059)
* Transient embedding-provider errors (for example an OpenAI-compatible 200 with empty `data: []`) were relabeled as token-limit errors. Only genuine oversize input raises `EmbeddingTokenLimitError`; other provider errors propagate unchanged (#791)
* The filter DSL now fails closed with a 422 instead of a 500 on bad shapes, coerces operands by column type (so `{"session_id": {"ne": "abc"}}` is a string inequality rather than "invalid numeric"), and treats `NOT` / `ne` as null-safe (`IS NOT TRUE` / `IS DISTINCT FROM`) so negation no longer drops rows whose field is unset. Closed-set columns like `level` reject unknown values. Session-allowlist entries must be well-formed ids (`*` is 422, not a silent widen) (#947)
* `ne` on JSONB metadata keys is null-safe: a missing key is not equal to the compared value, so `{"metadata": {"foo": {"ne": "bar"}}}` includes rows where `foo` is unset (#1036)
* Oversized texts in `simple_batch_embed` are truncated to the embedding token cap instead of failing the whole batch. Representation processing reports failed observer saves in `RepresentationCompletedEvent` and raises when every observer save fails (#1019)
* Assistant `reasoning_content` (DeepSeek / some OpenRouter models) is preserved across tool-loop turns. Previously the tool loop dropped thinking content before building the next assistant history message, so continuation requests failed. `reasoning_details` still takes precedence when both are present (#1034)
* `create_observations` now honors `DERIVER_DEDUPLICATE` instead of hardcoding `deduplicate=True`, matching the representation write path (#1018)
* `provider_params.timeout` is forwarded to the OpenAI-compatible embedding client, not just the LLM client (#1024)
* Conclusions semantic-search validation errors name the field and the constraint instead of returning a generic 422 (#960)
* OpenAI-compatible embedding calls request `encoding_format=float` so providers that default to base64 do not break pgvector inserts (#938)
* Gemini batch embedding works for `gemini-embedding-2*` models, which rejected the previous request shape (#745)
* MCP OAuth with no advertised scopes no longer defaults to read-only (which 403'd chat and search POSTs). Protected-resource metadata advertises read and write (#1004)
### Added
* Session allowlist on the Dialectic and representation via a constrained `filters` body on `POST /peers/{peer_id}/chat` and `/representation`, supporting only the `session_id` key (a session id, a bare list, or `{"in": [...]}`). Unsupported keys and shapes are rejected with 422 rather than silently ignored, it composes with `session_id` (which must be included in the allowlist when both are given), and it is capped at 1,000 sessions per request. Enforcement is uniform and fail-closed at every recall chokepoint: scoped conclusion recall is restricted to `level == "explicit"` (dream-derived conclusions carry a single `session_name` but are synthesized across all sessions, so that stamp can't be scoped on), `get_reasoning_chain` is unavailable under an allowlist, and an empty allowlist short-circuits to empty results everywhere. Workspace keys pass the allowlist as-given; peer-scoped JWTs must be an active member of every allowlisted session (401 otherwise) (#882)
* Bare-list membership sugar in the filter DSL: `{"session_id": ["s1", "s2"]}` is now shorthand for `{"session_id": {"in": [...]}}` on regular columns generically. JSONB metadata columns are excluded and keep containment semantics. Strictly additive, since a bare list on a regular column previously compiled to a type-mismatched equality that matched nothing (#881)
* Optional structured outputs on the Dialectic: `response_format` (a JSON Schema with root type `object`) on peer chat makes `content` a JSON string conforming to that schema. Only a conservative subset of JSON Schema is supported, with DoS guards and non-recursive `$ref` support (#896)
* Combined tool calling and structured output in the LLM transport layer, with per-backend request shaping: OpenAI routes tool-carrying structured requests through `create()` with an explicit `json_schema` response format (`parse()` 500s on non-strict function tools), Anthropic skips the `{` JSON prefill when tools are present so `tool_use` blocks stay reachable, and Gemini injects a schema instruction into the final turn instead of using native `response_schema` (rejected alongside function calling before Gemini 3). All backends skip structured-output parsing on tool-call turns, which carry no consumable content (#907)
* `card_refresh` dream type: a lightweight dream that runs only the peer-card update, for event-driven refreshes such as membership changes and cold starts. Handled by a new `CardRefreshSpecialist` restricted to `get_recent_observations`, `search_memory`, and `update_peer_card` (no observation-mutating tools) with a tool-iteration cap of `min(6, DREAM.MAX_TOOL_ITERATIONS)`. `POST /v3/workspaces/{workspace_id}/schedule_dream` accepts `dream_type=card_refresh` plus a `rebuild` flag, which omits the existing card from the prompt so the specialist rebuilds it solely from observations present in the collection. Card refreshes never advance the omni dream guard pair (`last_dream_at` / `last_dream_document_count`) (#883)
* Full-fidelity LLM trace stream, with Langfuse as one projection over it: each call is captured once (`CapturedLLMCall`) and fanned out to a CloudEvents trace stream (`llm.call.traced` / `trace.content`) and a Langfuse exporter, both reconstructing trace → run → step → generation from the same source of truth. Adds `TELEMETRY_TRACE_PAYLOADS_ENABLED` (default `false`), `TELEMETRY_TRACE_MAX_BYTES` (default 262144, per-message cap with oversized content clipped), `TELEMETRY_TRACE_PURPOSES` (JSON list of `CallPurpose` values; empty means all), and `LANGFUSE_EXPORTER_MODE` (`exporter` by default; `inline` is kept for one release for side-by-side validation). Embedding calls are traced, dreamer branches nest under one dream trace, tool calls become spans under their step, and high-volume events are sampled deterministically. `TRACE_ENDPOINT` is dropped (#845)
* Redis Cluster support via `CACHE_CLUSTER` (for example GCP Memorystore for Redis Cluster), alongside a new `CACHE_LOCK_WAIT_CHECK_INTERVAL_SECONDS` (#905)
* `EMBEDDING_MODEL_CONFIG__MAX_BATCH_SIZE` caps texts per embedding request for OpenAI-compatible providers with smaller limits than OpenAI's, such as DashScope `text-embedding-v4` (10) and Alibaba Bailian `qwen3.7-text-embedding` (20). When unset, native provider defaults are preserved (OpenAI 2048, Gemini 100) (#983)
* Per-request provider timeouts via `provider_params.timeout` on any model config, validated at config load so a bad value fails at startup with the exact config path instead of surfacing per-request as a retried 500. Good values normalize to float seconds; Gemini's is converted to milliseconds (#832)
* `RepresentationCompletedEvent` now reports deduplication counts: `exact_dup_in_batch_count`, `exact_dup_existing_count`, `semantic_dup_rejected_count`, and `semantic_dup_replaced_count` (#910)
* OAuth discovery for MCP clients: the MCP worker serves `/.well-known/oauth-protected-resource` (RFC 9728) without auth so clients can discover the authorization server, and a 401 now carries `WWW-Authenticate: Bearer resource_metadata="..."` (exposed cross-origin) to start the flow (#923)
* Prometheus metrics for the immediate-embed fast path: tasks shed because `EMBEDDING_MAX_PENDING_EMBED_TASKS` was reached, and the current in-flight task count (#892)
* Docs: a detailed system architecture diagram, a Codex integration guide (#879), a structured-outputs page (#896), a section on filtering conclusions by reasoning level (#851), a health-check endpoint reference, and SDK updates (#867)
### Changed
* **Breaking config change:** `DERIVER_REPRESENTATION_BATCH_MAX_TOKENS` is split into two settings that were previously conflated — `DERIVER_REPRESENTATION_BATCH_WORK_UNIT_TARGET_TOKENS` (default 512), the producer-side minimum a work unit accumulates before the deriver claims it, where `0` disables the gate; and `DERIVER_REPRESENTATION_BATCH_TARGET_INPUT_TOKENS` (default 1024), the consumer-side maximum context-window tokens per deriver LLM call. Deployments setting the old name must migrate (#889)
* The immediate-embed fast path now applies backpressure: `EMBEDDING_MAX_PENDING_EMBED_TASKS` (default 50) caps in-flight embed tasks, and once saturated, message creation skips the fast path entirely and the reconciler embeds on its next cycle. `0` disables the fast path (#892)
* Explicit-level documents are now kept session-pure, so memory can be built by copying explicit documents between collections. Enforcement refuses rather than rewrites: `create_documents` rejects explicit documents with a null `session_name`, exact dedup keys on (content, level, session-for-explicit), semantic dedup scopes candidate search to the same level and — for explicit documents — the same session, and the generic `create_observations` tool rejects `level='explicit'` outside message-ingestion (deriver) context. Derived levels keep cross-session consolidation (#883)
* Sentry's `before_send` filter is centralized as `default_before_send` in `src/telemetry/sentry.py` instead of living only in the API's `main.py`, so the deriver gets the same non-actionable-exception filtering. All Sentry events also carry a `namespace` tag for correlation (#934, #870)
* The minimal deriver's extraction examples no longer teach inferences its own output schema forbids. The `EXAMPLES` block demonstrated deriving a specific birthday from "I just had my 25th birthday last Saturday", deriving residence from a single visit ("I took my dog for a walk in NYC" → "alice lives in NYC"), and a "+ general knowledge" deductive output the deriver has no channel for. The replacements stay inside the schema's contract and teach the boundary: the dog/NYC message is kept and shown extracting correctly, and a separate example shows "lives in NYC" is valid when actually stated (#985)
* Dreamer specialists are instructed not to output summaries (#894)
* `session_name` is deprecated for scoping in favor of the session allowlist. It is not removed and not aliased: it also pins the query to one session, bypasses observer scoping, and drives session-history injection into the dialectic prompt, so it has no drop-in replacement (#882)
* The MCP worker no longer requires the `X-Honcho-User-Name` or `X-Honcho-Assistant-Name` headers (#923)
### Fixed
* Session scoping was applied to only one of the three working-representation query paths: `session_name` reached the recent-documents query, but the semantic and most-derived paths ignored it, so `limit_to_session` leaked cross-session conclusions into perspectives. The allowlist is now threaded uniformly through all three paths and pushed down to pgvector and external vector stores (#881)
* Empty membership lists failed open in the vector-store filter builders, silently widening scope: LanceDB dropped empty `IN` clauses and Turbopuffer emitted a bare `In []` with undocumented semantics. Both now emit an explicit always-false predicate, and `_build_filter_conditions` checks `is not None` rather than truthiness so an empty list is no longer treated like `None` (#881, #882)
* Session-scoped CRUD helpers ignored the session allowlist entirely, so a caller could read a session the allowlist forbids. The API routes guarded this with a 422, but the dialectic tools call these CRUD functions directly and bypassed it. `_semantic_search_messages` (covering `search_messages` and `search_messages_temporal`), `grep_messages`, `get_messages_by_date_range`, `get_recent_history`, and `get_observation_context` now return `[]` when `session_name` is set and outside the allowlist (#882)
* The cache client logged the full Redis URL — including the password — at INFO and WARNING on every connection attempt and failure, exposing the live credential in container logs and downstream aggregation. Credentials are now redacted across userinfo, the `?password=` (redis-py) and `?secret=` (cashews) query params, scheme-less URLs whose password is invisible to `.port`/`.password` parsing, and malformed URLs, whose fallback previously echoed the raw input verbatim (#869)
* A `top_k` of `0` reached the vector store, where Turbopuffer rejects it with a 400 (`top_k must be between 1 and 10000`). A non-positive `top_k` now returns `[]` before the embedding call, and the semantic budget floors at 1 so an explicitly requested search isn't silently allocated zero (#970)
* Gemini clients had no HTTP timeout, so a stalled socket wedged the deriver worker's uvloop event loop, which the in-process reconciler shares. A 10-minute timeout is now set on both the Gemini LLM client and the Gemini embedding client (#903)
* Dreamer conclusions were dated to ingestion time rather than their latest source observation, and their timestamps are now normalized (#890)
* Langfuse I/O annotation was gated on `LANGFUSE_PUBLIC_KEY` instead of `langfuse_inline_enabled`, so in the default `exporter` mode it called `update_current_generation()` with no active span — logging "No active span in current context" roughly 14 times per dialectic run and building throwaway `model_dump` payloads on every LLM call. Separately, `AgentToolSummaryCreatedEvent` hardcoded `run_id="deriver"` / `iteration=0`, polluting `run_id` grouping in the CloudEvents stream with a phantom run; both fields are now optional and the resource id is keyed on `message_id:summary_type` (schema\_version 2 → 3) (#845)
* Assistant tool calls were dropped from the captured trace stream for OpenAI and Gemini: `build_captured_messages` read only `{role, content, tool_call_id}`, but those providers keep tool calls outside `content`, so replayed tool-call turns landed as empty content and Gemini lost its text and tool results entirely. Tool calls are now normalized per provider into a unified `tool_calls` field and folded into the content hash. Gemini's `thought_signature` is bytes, so `model_dump(mode="json")` raised `UnicodeDecodeError` inside `emit_trace`, silently dropping whole tool-calling iterations from the trace stream (billing and Langfuse were unaffected); it is now base64-encoded on the telemetry path while replay keeps the raw bytes (#845)
* `EmbeddingClient.encoding` forced full client construction, raising "OpenAI API key is required" even though tiktoken needs no credentials. The document dedup tie-break only needs `.encoding` for token counting, so any test hitting that path failed in environments without embedding keys — notably CI for pull requests from forks. The encoding is now resolved from the configured model directly, falling back to `cl100k_base`, and the underlying client's encoding is reused only when it has already been constructed (#955)
* The Docker build failed under Podman because the uv build inputs weren't copied (#878)
* LanceDB was installed on macOS Intel, where it doesn't work. A PEP 508 marker excludes `darwin/x86_64` and the LanceDB vector-store import is wrapped so a misconfiguration surfaces as a clear config error (#496)
* Prompt checks requiring the literal token "json" for `json_object` mode are now satisfied in lowercase (#887)
* Reverted an unintended `RepresentationCompletedEvent` schema-version increment
* Documented preinstalling pgvector as a privileged role for deployments where the `DB_CONNECTION_URI` role deliberately cannot create extensions (managed Postgres, Kubernetes operators, NixOS). `CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS vector` does not help there, because Postgres checks the privilege before checking whether the extension exists. Docker Compose is unaffected, since the bundled stack connects as the `postgres` superuser (#984)
### Added
* `api_request_duration_seconds` Prometheus histogram tracking per-route request latency, labeled by method and endpoint (#837)
* LLM `provider_params` passthroughs (`extra_body` / `extra_headers` / `extra_query`) are now forwarded to the underlying provider transport across all backends, with shape validation that rejects non-mapping values (#821)
* `structured_output_mode` model-config option to use `json_object` mode for OpenAI-compatible providers that lack native Structured Outputs support (used by the deriver) (#820)
* OpenRouter app-attribution headers (`HTTP-Referer` / `X-Openrouter-Title`) are now sent on OpenAI-compatible clients when the configured base URL is OpenRouter, so requests are attributed to "Honcho" in OpenRouter's dashboard (#805)
* Langfuse traces are now tagged with user and session IDs for easier trace filtering (#814)
* `DERIVER_REPRESENTATION_BATCH_MAX_AGE_SECONDS` (default 1800s) lets sub-threshold representation work units flush once their oldest unprocessed queue item ages out. Set it to `0` to keep the legacy behavior where sub-threshold tails wait indefinitely unless `DERIVER_FLUSH_ENABLED=true` (#826)
* Conclusion responses now include a `level` field (`explicit`, `deductive`, `inductive`, `contradiction`); list/query endpoints support filtering by `level` via `filters`, with reserved filter keys protected from being overridden by user-supplied filters (#851)
### Changed
* Peer-scoped JWTs now get read-only access to the sessions their peer is an active member of (session context, summaries, peers, their own per-session config, search, and message reads). Session-scoped JWTs remain confined to their session and cannot reach peer routes (#679)
* Compacted Honcho's log output, with guarded ms/s metric formatting that falls back to a plain string for non-numeric values (#836)
* Sentry now drops noisy infra/scrape transactions: the reconciler opens a transaction only once a batch has rows (idle cycles emit none), and a `traces_sampler` returns `0.0` for `/metrics`, `/health`, `/openapi.json`, `/docs`, `/redoc`, and the deriver metrics server. `SENTRY.TRACES_SAMPLE_RATE` still governs real traffic (#834)
### Fixed
* Peer- and session-scoped JWTs were effectively workspace-scoped: authorization walked the route's declared scope and fell through to a workspace match, so a `{w, p: alice}` token could act on any peer in the workspace. JWTs are now authorized by their narrowest claim and never widen to workspace access (#679)
* The keys API now rejects creating a peer- or session-scoped key without a workspace. Such keys were minted successfully but failed verification on every request (#679)
* Agent-supplied observation IDs carrying the display-format `id:` prefix are now normalized (prefix and trailing whitespace stripped) before `source_ids` are stored and on `get_reasoning_chain` lookups, fixing corrupted provenance links and broken reasoning-chain traversal (#795)
* Fixed a `create_tree` keyword-argument mismatch in the Dreamer's surprisal tree construction (#749)
* Providers that omit output-token counts (observed with Gemini on tool-loop completions) returned `output_tokens=None`, which raised a Pydantic validation error that aborted the call and crashed the Dreamer's induction phase before inductive conclusions were persisted. `None` is now coerced to `0` so token accounting degrades gracefully (#809)
* Document creation now performs exact (case-insensitive, whitespace-trimmed) content deduplication before the existing semantic dedup step: exact duplicates within a batch collapse to a single insert, and an exact match against a live document reinforces it (atomic `times_derived` increment) instead of creating a new row (#861)
* The OpenAI backend passed `tool_choice` through raw while the Anthropic and Gemini backends translate Honcho's canonical vocabulary to their native form, so on a mixed-provider fallback chain (for example Gemini primary → OpenAI backup) a canonical `"any"` reached OpenAI unchanged and was rejected as an invalid param. The OpenAI backend now converts it, mirroring the others: `any`/`required` → `required`, `auto`/`none` pass through, and a tool-name string or `{"name": ...}` dict becomes a function selection (#850)
* Langfuse `@observe` auto-capture serialized every argument of `honcho_llm_call_inner` into the generation span input, including `client_override` (a live `AsyncOpenAI`/`genai` client) and `selected_config` (which carries `api_key`). Auto-capture deep-copied the client into a half-constructed object whose teardown raised (`AsyncHttpxClientWrapper ... no attribute '_state'` on OpenAI, flooding stderr; `BaseApiClient ... no attribute '_http_options'` on Gemini), and it leaked `ModelConfig.api_key` into traces. Capture is now an explicit allowlist: `capture_input`/`capture_output` are disabled and curated, serializable input and output are stamped instead, with tuning knobs surfaced as `model_parameters` via a secret-bearing denylist and per-call token usage mirrored as `usage_details` (#849)
### Added
* Messages are now embedded via a background task rather than blocking API request
* Read-only DB session mode (`get_read_db` / `tracked_db(..., read_only=True)`) so reads don't hold a transaction open across the work
* `CORS_ORIGINS` env var to configure CORS allowed origins without editing source; defaults match the prior hardcoded list, so self-hosted deployments behind custom domains can whitelist their frontend (#697)
* `scripts/generate_jwt.py` — utility for minting scoped or admin Honcho JWTs (`--admin`, `--workspace`/`--peer`/`--session`, `--expires` with human-friendly durations, `--print-only`) without calling the keys API (#757)
* `STALE_WORK_UNIT_CLEANUP_INTERVAL_SECONDS` (default 60s) — minimum jittered spacing between deriver stale-work-unit cleanup runs, so cleanup no longer runs on every seconds-scale poll (`0.0` keeps the legacy every-poll behavior) (#773)
### Changed
* Optimized the deriver and dreamer prompt cache prefixes to improve prompt-cache hit rates (#806)
### Fixed
* `times_derived` is now properly reinforced when a duplicate conclusion is detected. It had been pinned at 1 for nearly every conclusion (the reject-new branch dropped the increment and the new-wins branch reset the count to 1), so `ORDER BY times_derived DESC` fell back to arbitrary heap order and froze stale conclusions to the front of injected context. Reinforcement is now an atomic increment and both most-derived queries gained a `created_at DESC` recency tiebreaker (#768)
* Webhook creation now correctly rejects private/internal IP addresses (#793)
### Changed
* Connection acquisition is now a single attempt with no server-side retry, on a vanilla `AsyncSession`. A new `DB_CONNECT_TIMEOUT_SECONDS` (default 2s) bounds the attempt so a saturated or unreachable pooler fails fast instead of holding a client connection open to re-knock. A saturated DB now surfaces to the caller — the API returns an error and the deriver backs off and retries on a later poll — which lets the pooler drain rather than amplifying saturation.
### Added
* Deriver poll jitter so instances that start together don't poll in lockstep: `DERIVER_POLLING_STARTUP_JITTER_SECONDS` (random delay before the first poll, default 30s) and `DERIVER_POLLING_JITTER_RATIO` (±fraction applied to every poll sleep, default 0.5). Both disable at `0.0`; the underlying backoff schedule is unchanged.
### Removed
* Reverted the connection-checkout retry and `HonchoAsyncSession` custom session introduced in 3.0.8. Removed the `DB_CONNECTION_RETRY_ENABLED` / `DB_CONNECTION_RETRY_MAX_DELAY_SECONDS` / `DB_CONNECTION_RETRY_BACKOFF_INITIAL_SECONDS` / `DB_CONNECTION_RETRY_BACKOFF_MAX_SECONDS` settings, the `db_connection_acquisitions{outcome=...}` Prometheus counter, and the `db.pool.acquire` Sentry span. Alerting built on `db_connection_acquisitions` should migrate to `db_pool_connections` / `db_queries_in_flight`.
### Added
* Connection-checkout retry with bounded exponential backoff (tenacity) on `get_db`/`tracked_db`: transient transaction-pooler (Supavisor) rejections — SQLAlchemy `TimeoutError` and `OperationalError` — now retry with backoff instead of surfacing as 500s under client-connection saturation. Gated by
`DB_CONNECTION_RETRY_ENABLED` with configurable delay/backoff knobs; \~10s default budget (#758)
* `HonchoAsyncSession` — a lazy `AsyncSession` that checks out its pooled connection (with retry) on the first DB-touching call rather than at construction. Request handlers doing non-DB work (embedding, file, LLM) before their first query no longer pin a pooler connection across it. Only the checkout is retried;
the statement still runs exactly once, so writes are never duplicated (#758)
* Adaptive deriver queue polling: the poll interval backs off when the queue is idle or erroring (base → max, doubling each cycle) and snaps back to base the moment work is claimed, cutting steady-state query load against the DB. Gated by `DERIVER_POLLING_BACKOFF_ENABLED` with configurable max/multiplier (#758)
* New Prometheus `db_pool_connections` gauge (checked\_out / checked\_in / size / overflow), labeled `api`|`deriver`, registered in both the API lifespan and the deriver metrics server (#758)
* New Prometheus `db_connection_acquisitions{outcome=ok|retried|exhausted}` counter — the alertable early-warning signal that connection checkouts are retrying through pooler rejection, before requests start failing (#758)
* New Prometheus `db_queries_in_flight` gauge — statements actually executing on the wire (via SQLAlchemy cursor-execute events). Paired with `checked_out`, the gap reveals connections held but parked (the "idle in transaction during an external call" antipattern). Gated on `METRICS.ENABLED` for zero overhead when
off (#758)
* Explicit `SqlalchemyIntegration` in both the API and deriver Sentry inits; connection acquisition wrapped in a `db.pool.acquire` span with live pool stats captured on retry exhaustion (#758)
### Changed
* Default `POOL_TIMEOUT` lowered to 5s, with validation that it stays under the connection-retry budget when a pooled (non-null) `POOL_CLASS` is configured; `config.toml.example` and the v2/v3 configuration docs updated to match (#758)
* `HonchoAsyncSession` wraps every DB-touching session method (execute / scalar / scalars / flush / merge / refresh / commit / get / get\_one / stream / stream\_scalars / delete) so the lazy-checkout-with-retry guarantee has no holes; the acquired flag resets on `close()`/`reset()` so a reused session re-acquires on
next use (#758)
### Fixed
* Roll the session back on a retryable checkout failure before retrying — a failed autobegin could otherwise leave it pending-rollback, making the next connection attempt raise instead of cleanly re-checking-out (#758)
* Guard `DBPoolCollector.collect()` so a pool-read/import hiccup can't raise and abort the entire `/metrics` scrape (Prometheus drops all metrics if any collector raises) (#758)
* Clamp the pool overflow gauge to ≥ 0 (it could report negative before the pool fills) (#758)
* Removed a double-sleep in the deriver idle poll so the backoff cap is a true cap rather than 2× (#758)
### Added
* New `src/llm/` package as the single owner of provider runtime: clients, backends, history adapters, tool loop, request builder, credentials, and caching policy (#459)
* New cloudevent `LLMCallCompletedEvent` (`llm.call.completed`) fires once per provider hit with full cost-attribution context: transport/provider\_label, model, token counts with cache breakdown, finish\_reason, outcome, retry/fallback state, duration, tool-call shape, streaming flag, and agent correlation (`run_id` + iteration) (#637)
* `RepresentationCompletedEvent` now carries `total_input_tokens` for full-trace cost attribution; per-emitter `honcho_version` injection; deterministic per-`run_id` high-volume sampler via `TelemetrySettings.HIGH_VOLUME_SAMPLE_RATE` (#637)
* Deriver custom instructions: per-workspace/peer guidance threaded into the deriver prompt with a `MAX_CUSTOM_INSTRUCTIONS_TOKENS` budget (default 2000); deriver `MAX_INPUT_TOKENS` raised 23000 → 25000 (#609)
* Configurable embedding dimensions: `EMBEDDING_MODEL_CONFIG__DIMENSIONS_MODE` (`auto`/`always`/`never`) controls whether OpenAI `dimensions=` is forwarded (#678)
* New `honcho-cli` package — Python CLI for inspecting and managing peers, sessions, and configuration against a Honcho deployment (#424)
* `HONCHO_API_URL` env var support in the MCP Worker for self-hosted deployments (#575)
* API ID `max_length` increased from 100 to 512 across `WorkspaceCreate`, `PeerCreate`, and `SessionCreate` to align with the DB schema (#684)
* `AttemptPlan` dataclass pins per-retry provider selection across stream-final retries so streaming doesn't bounce back to primary after the tool loop has settled on fallback (#459)
* Gemini JSON-schema sanitizer for `function_declarations` — strips keywords Gemini's validator rejects while preserving semantics for other backends (#459)
### Changed
* All LLM orchestration moved out of `src/utils/clients.py` into `src/llm/` with modules split by responsibility (#459)
* Default `ModelConfig` factories (deriver, summary, dreamer specialists, dialectic levels) normalized with no extra parameters set by default; operators add transport/thinking overrides explicitly (#459)
* OpenAI reasoning-model routing widened to cover `gpt-5.x` and `o1/o3/o4` — these models receive `max_completion_tokens` instead of `max_tokens` (#459)
* Peer card prompts reframed as stable identity markers; induction specialist now opts out of peer card writes so only deduction touches the card (#686)
* Vector store queries no longer fetch embedding vectors — only document metadata is returned, reducing payload size and DB load (pgvector, lancedb, turbopuffer) (#682)
* Langfuse trace metadata now includes `namespace`, `model`, and `provider` so traces can be filtered by deployment slice (#565)
* Deriver: model-aware tokenizer (replaces the previously hardcoded encoding) and explicit guard on empty message content (#647)
* Dialectic level defaults now merge correctly with per-level overrides (#656)
* Default dialectic tool choice switched to `auto` (#630)
* Vector sync given a substantial retry budget to tolerate transient embedding provider outages (#604)
* `AgentToolConclusionsDeletedEvent` payload now carries `levels` (#612)
* Turbopuffer: `InternalServerError` caught and surfaced as a warning rather than a hard failure; vector store sync errors downgraded to warnings (#561)
### Fixed
* `reverse` query parameter is now honored on the v3 workspace list, peer list, workspace-scoped session list, and peer-scoped session list. Honcho SDKs at 2.1.0+ were already sending `reverse=true` for these routes but the server silently ignored it. Ties on `created_at` now fall back to the internal nanoid `id` for stable ordering across pages (#685)
* LLM client factories now receive `base_url` from `LLMSettings` for default providers — operators pointing at OpenAI-compatible proxies via `LLM__OPENAI_BASE_URL` were previously ignored on the default path (#643, fixes #641)
* Internal N+1 query in dialectic agent tool execution — collapsed per-iteration DB lookups into a single fetch (#652)
* Dreamer threshold and time-guard semantics: count filter now includes only `documents.level == 'explicit'` (was inflating threshold via dreamer-created levels and creating a feedback loop); `last_dream_at` write relocated from enqueue to process so duplicate enqueues or failed runs no longer reset the 8-hour time guard (#573)
* Deriver: blank observations are filtered out before embedding (previously triggered noisy embedding calls and persisted empty rows) (#615)
* Surprisal module: filter format corrected from `{"level": levels}` to `{"level": {"in": levels}}` — the prior call silently returned 0 results and made the entire Surprisal phase of the Dream cycle a no-op (#581, fixes #559)
* Removed hardcoded `stop_sequences` override from Deriver `ModelConfig` (was clobbering operator-configured stop sequences) (#587)
* Embedding client: `embed()` now wraps single-string input in an array, restoring compatibility with OpenAI-compatible third-party providers that reject scalar input (#586)
* Docker Compose: deriver service startup gated on the API service healthcheck — prevents races where the deriver starts before the API has run migrations (#689)
* Docker image: `HEALTHCHECK` directive removed from the shared base image; service-level health checks now belong in each service's own configuration (#530)
* Removed strict parameter validation for thinking params on Anthropic and OpenAI transports — was rejecting valid per-transport configs (#686)
* Stream-final retries pin to the `AttemptPlan` that succeeded rather than re-running provider selection through the outer `current_attempt` ContextVar (#459)
* Gemini `cached_content` reuse keys now include `system_instruction` and `tool_config` so cache hits don't cross configurations (#459)
* CrewAI example updated for the latest CrewAI protocol (#631)
### Removed
* `src/utils/clients.py` deleted; its responsibilities are split across `src/llm/registry.py`, `src/llm/credentials.py`, and the backend-specific modules (#459)
* `HEALTHCHECK` directive from the shared Docker image (#530)
### Changed
* Tightened transaction scopes across search, agent tools, queue manager, and webhook delivery to minimize DB connection hold time during external operations (#525)
* Search operations refactored to two-phase pattern — external work (embeddings, LLM calls) completes before opening a transaction (#525)
* Agent tool executor performs external operations before acquiring DB sessions (#525)
* Queue manager transaction scope reduced to only the critical section (#525)
* Webhook delivery no longer holds a DB session parameter (#525)
### Fixed
* Session leakage in non-session-scoped dialectic chat calls (#526)
### Added
* Health check endpoint (`/health`) for container orchestration and load balancer probes (#510)
### Fixed
* explicit rollback on all transactions to force connection closed
### Added
* JSONB metadata validation enforces 100 key limit and max depth of 5 (#419)
### Changed
* Schemas refactored from single `schemas.py` into `schemas/api.py`, `schemas/configuration.py`, and `schemas/internal.py` with backwards-compatible re-exports (#419)
### Fixed
* Missing `deleted_at` filter on `RepresentationManager._query_documents_recent()` and `._query_documents_most_derived()` allowed soft-deleted documents to leak into the deriver's working representation (#456)
* `CleanupStaleItemsCompletedEvent` emitted spuriously when no queue item was actually deleted (#454)
* Empty JSON file uploads caused unhandled errors; now returns normalized error responses (#434)
* Memory leak: `_observation_locks` switched to `WeakValueDictionary` to prevent unbounded growth (#419)
* SQL injection in `dependencies.py`: parameterized `set_config` calls to prevent injection via request context (#419)
* NUL byte crashes: string inputs (message content, queries, peer cards) now stripped at schema level (#419)
* Filter recursion depth capped at 5 to prevent stack overflow (#419)
* Dedup-skipped observations now correctly reflected in created counts (#477)
* External vector store support for message search — routes queries through configured external vector store with oversampling and
deduplication to handle chunked embeddings (#479)
* Dialectic agent no longer holds a DB connection during LLM calls — embeddings are pre-computed before tool execution, DB sessions isolated in `extract_preferences`, `query_documents` no longer accepts a DB session parameter (#477)
### Added
* Consolidated session context into a single DB session with 40/60 token budget allocation between summary and messages
* Observation validation via `ObservationInput` Pydantic schema with partial-success support and batch embedding with per-observation fallback
* Peer card hard cap of 40 facts with case-insensitive deduplication and whitespace normalization
* Safe integer coercion (`_safe_int`) for all LLM tool inputs to handle non-integer values like `"Infinity"`
* Embedding pre-computation and reuse across multiple search calls in dialectic and representation flows
* Peer existence validation in dialectic chat endpoints — raises ResourceNotFoundException instead of silently failing
* Logging filter to suppress noisy `GET /metrics` access logs
* Oolong long-context aggregation benchmark (synth and real variants, 1K–4M token context windows)
* MolecularBench fact quality evaluation (ambiguity, decontextuality, minimality scoring)
* CoverageBench information recall evaluation (gold fact extraction, coverage matching, QA verification)
* LoCoMo summary-as-context baseline evaluation
* Webhook delivery tests, dependency lifecycle tests, queue cleanup tests, summarizer fallback tests
* Parallel test execution via pytest-xdist with worker-specific databases
* `test_reasoning_levels.py` script for LOCOM dataset testing across reasoning levels
### Changed
* Workspace deletion is now async — returns 202 Accepted, validates no active sessions (409 Conflict), cascade-deletes in background
* Redis caching layer now stores plain-dict instead of ORM objects, with v2-prefixed keys, storage, resilient `safe_cache_set`/`safe_cache_delete` helpers, and deferred post-commit cache invalidation
* All `get_or_create_*` CRUD operations now use savepoints (`db.begin_nested()`) instead of commit/rollback for race condition prevention
* Reconciler vector sync uses direct ORM mutation instead of batch parameterized UPDATE statements
* Summarizer enforces hard word limit in prompt and creates fallback text for empty summaries with `summary_tokens = 0`
* Blocked Gemini responses (SAFETY, RECITATION, PROHIBITED\_CONTENT, BLOCKLIST) now raise `LLMError` to trigger retry/backup-provider logic
* Gemini client explicitly sets `max_output_tokens` from `max_tokens` parameter
* All deriver and metrics collector logging replaced with structured `logging.getLogger(__name__)` calls
* Dreamer specialist prompts updated to enforce durable-facts-only peer cards with max 40 entries and deduplication
* `GetOrCreateResult` changed from `NamedTuple` to `dataclass` with `async post_commit()` method
* FastAPI upgraded from 0.111.0 to 0.131.0; added pyarrow dependency
* Queue status filtering to only show user-facing tasks (representation, summary, dream); excludes internal infrastructure tasks
### Fixed
* JWT timestamp bug — `JWTParams.t` was evaluated once at class definition time instead of per-instance
* Session cache invalidation on deletion was missing
* `get_peer_card()` now properly propagates `ResourceNotFoundException` instead of swallowing it
* `set_peer_card()` ensures peer exists via `get_or_create_peers()` before updating
* Backup provider failover with proper tool input type safety
* Removed `setup_admin_jwt()` from server startup
* Sentry coroutine detection switched from `asyncio.iscoroutinefunction` to `inspect.iscoroutinefunction`
### Removed
* `explicit.py` and `obex.py` benchmarks replaced by coverage.py and molecular.py
* Claude Code review automation workflow (`.github/workflows/claude.yml`)
* Coverage reporting from default pytest configuration
### Added
* Documentation for reasoning\_level and Claude Code plugin
### Changed
* Gave dreaming sub-agents better prompting around peer card creation, tweaked overall prompts
### Fixed
* Added message-search fallback for memory search tool, necessary in fresh sessions
* Made FLUSH\_ENABLED a config value
* Removed N+1 query in search\_messages
### Fixed
* Token counting in Explicit Agent Loop
* Backwards compatibility of queue items
### Added
* Agentic Dreamer for intelligent memory consolidation using LLM agents
* Agentic Dialectic for query answering using LLM agents with tool use
* Reasoning levels configuration for dialectic (`minimal`, `low`, `medium`, `high`, `max`)
* Prometheus token tracking for deriver and dialectic operations
* n8n integration
* Cloud Events for auditable telemetry
* External Vector Store support for turbopuffer and lancedb with reconciliation flow
### Changed
* API route renaming for consistency
* Dreamer and dialectic now respect peer card configuration settings
* Observations renamed to Conclusions across API and SDKs
* Deriver to buffer representation tasks to normalize workloads
* Local Representation tasks to create singular QueueItems
* getContext endpoint to use `search_query` rather than force `last_user_message`
### Fixed
* Dream scheduling bugs
* Summary creation when start\_message\_id > end\_message\_id
* Cashews upgrade to prevent NoScriptError
* Memory leak in `accumulate_metric` call
### Removed
* Peer card configuration from message configuration; peer cards no longer created/updated in deriver process
### Fixed
* Backwards compatibility for `message_ids` field in documents to handle legacy tuple format
### Added
* Message level configurations
* CRUD operations for observations
* Comprehensive test cases for harness
* Peer level get\_context
* Set Peer Card Method
* Manual dreaming trigger endpoint
### Changed
* Configurations to support more flags for fine-grained control of the deriver, peer cards, summaries, etc.
* Working Representations to support more fine-grained parameters
### Fixed
* File uploads to match `MessageCreate` structure
* Cache invalidation strategy
### Added
* Redis caching to improve DB IO
* Backup LLM provider to avoid failures when a provider is down
### Changed
* QueueItems to use standardized columns
* Improved Deduplication logic for Representation Tasks
* More finegrained metrics for representation, summary, and peer card tasks
* DB constraint to follow standard naming conventions
### Fixed
* Langfuse tracing to have readable waterfalls
* Alembic Migrations to match models.py
* message\_in\_seq correctly included in webhook payload
### Changed
* Alembic to always use a session pooler
* Statement timeout during alembic operations to 5 min
### Added
* Alembic migration validation test suite
### Fixed
* Alembic migrations to batch changes
* Batch message creation sequence number
### Changed
* Logging infrastructure to remove noisy messages
* Sentry integration is centralized
### Added
* Unified `Representation` class
* vllm client support
* Periodic queue cleanup logic
* WIP Dreaming Feature
* LongMemEval to Test Bench
* Prometheus Client for better Metrics
* Performance metrics instrumentation
* Error reporting to deriver
* Workspace Delete Method
* Multi-db option in test harness
### Changed
* Working Representations are Queried on the fly rather than cached in metadata
* EmbeddingStore to RepresentationFactory
* Summary Response Model to use public\_id of message for cutoff
* Semantic across codebase to reference resources based on `observer` and `observed`
* Prompts for Deriver & Dialectic to reference peer\_id and add examples
* `Get Context` route returns peer card and representation in addition to messages and summaries
* Refactoring logger.info calls to logger.debug where applicable
### Fixed
* Gemini client to use async methods
### Changed
* Deriver Rollup Queue processes interleaved messages for more context
### Fixed
* Dialectic Streaming to follow SSE conventions
* Sentry tracing in the deriver
### Added
* Get peer cards endpoint (`GET /v2/peers/{peer_id}/card`) for retrieving targeted peer context information
### Changed
* Replaced Mirascope dependency with small client implementation for better control
* Optimized deriver performance by using joins on messages table instead of storing token count in queue payload
* Database scope optimization for various operations
* Batch representation task processing for \~10x speed improvement in practice
### Fixed
* Separated clean and claim work units in queue manager to prevent race conditions
* Skip locked ActiveQueueSession rows on delete operations
* Langfuse SDK integration updates for compatibility
* Added configurable maximum message size to prevent token overflow in deriver
* Various minor bugfixes
### Fixed
* Added max message count to deriver in order to not overflow token limits
### Added
* `getSummaries` endpoint to get all available summaries for a session directly
* Peer Card feature to improve context for deriver and dialectic
### Changed
* Session Peer limit to be based on observers instead, renamed config value to
`SESSION_OBSERVERS_LIMIT`
* `Messages` can take a custom timestamp for the `created_at` field, defaulting
to the current time
* `get_context` endpoint returns detailed `Summary` object rather than just
summary content
* Working representations use a FIFO queue structure to maintain facts rather
than a full rewrite
* Optimized deriver enqueue by prefetching message sequence numbers (eliminates N+1 queries)
### Fixed
* Deriver uses `get_context` internally to prevent context window limit errors
* Embedding store will truncate context when querying documents to prevent embedding
token limit errors
* Queue manager to schedule work based on available works rather than total
number of workers
* Queue manager to use atomic db transactions rather than long lived transaction
for the worker lifecycle
* Timestamp formats unified to ISO 8601 across the codebase
* Internal get\_context method's cutoff value is exclusive now
### Added
* Arbitrary filters now available on all search endpoints
* Search combines full-text and semantic using reciprocal rank fusion
* Webhook support (currently only supports queue\_empty and test events, more to come)
* Small test harness and custom test format for evaluating Honcho output quality
* Added MCP server and documentation for it
### Changed
* Search has 10 results by default, max 100 results
* Queue structure generalized to handle more event types
* Summarizer now exhaustive by default and tuned for performance
### Fixed
* Resolve race condition for peers that leave a session while sending messages
* Added explicit rollback to solve integrity error in queue
* Re-introduced Sentry tracing to deriver
* Better integrity logic in get\_or\_create API methods
### Fixed
* Summarizer module to ignore empty summaries and pass appropriate one to get\_context
* Structured Outputs calls with OpenAI provider to pass strict=True to Pydantic Schema
### Added
* Test harness for custom Honcho evaluations
* Better support for session and peer aware dialectic queries
* Langfuse settings
* Added recent history to dialectic prompt, dynamic based on new context window size setting
### Fixed
* Summary queue logic
* Formatting of logs
* Filtering by session
* Peer targeting in queries
### Changed
* Made query expansion in dialectic off by default
* Overhauled logging
* Refactor summarization for performance and code clarity
* Refactor queue payloads for clarity
### Added
* File uploads
* Brand new "ROTE" deriver system
* Updated dialectic system
* Local working representations
* Better logging for deriver/dialectic
* Deriver Queue Status no longer has redundant data
### Fixed
* Document insertion
* Session-scoped and peer-targeted dialectic queries work now
* Minor bugs
### Removed
* Peer-level messages
### Changed
* Dialectic chat endpoint takes a single query
* Rearranged configuration values (LLM, Deriver, Dialectic, History->Summary)
### Fixed
* Groq API client to use the Async library
### Fixed
* Migration/provision scripts did not have correct database connection arguments, causing timeouts
### Fixed
* Bug that causes runtime error when Sentry flags are enabled
### Fixed
* Database initialization was misconfigured and led to provision\_db script failing: switch to consistent working configuration with transaction pooler
### Added
* Ergonomic SDKs for Python and TypeScript (uses Stainless underneath)
* Deriver Queue Status endpoint
* Complex arbitrary filters on workspace/session/peer/message
* Message embedding table for full semantic search
### Changed
* Overhauled documentation
* BasedPyright typing for entire project
* Resource filtering expanded to include logical operators
### Fixed
* Various bugs
* Use new config arrangement everywhere
* Remove hardcoded responses
### Added
* Ability to get a peer's working representation
* Metadata to all data primitives (Workspaces, Peers, Sessions, Messages)
* Internal metadata to store Honcho's state no longer exposed in API
* Batch message operations and enhanced message querying with token and message count limits
* Search and summary functionalities scoped by workspace, peer, and session
* Session context retrieval with summaries and token allocatio
* HNSW Index for Documents Table
* Centralized Configuration via Environment Variables or config.toml file
### Changed
* New architecture centered around the concept of a "peer" replaces the former
"app"/"user"/"session" paradigm
* Workspaces replace "apps" as top-level namespace
* Peers replace "users"
* Sessions no longer nested beneath peers and no longer limited to a single
user-assistant model. A session exists independently of any one peer and
peers can be added to and removed from sessions.
* Dialectic API is now part of the Peer, not the Session
* Dialectic API now allows queries to be scoped to a session or "targeted"
to a fellow peer
* Database schema migrated to adopt workspace/peer/session naming and structure
* Authentication and JWT scopes updated to workspace/peer/session hierarchy
* Queue processing now works on 'work units' instead of sessions
* Message token counting updated with tiktoken integration and fallback heuristic
* Queue and message processing updated to handle sender/target and task types for multi-peer scenarios
### Fixed
* Improved error handling and validation for batch message operations and metadata
* Database Sessions to be more atomic to reduce idle in transaction time
### Removed
* Metamessages removed in favor of metadata
* Collections and Documents no longer exposed in the API, solely internal
* Obsolete tests for apps, users, collections, documents, and metamessages
***
### Added
* Normalize resources to remove joins and increase query performance
* Query tracing for debugging
### Changed
* `/list` endpoints to not require a request body
* `metamessage_type` to `label` with backwards compatibility
* Database Provisioning to rely on alembic
* Database Session Manager to explicitly rollback transactions before closing
the connection
### Fixed
* Alembic Migrations to include initial database migrations
* Sentry Middleware to not report Honcho Exceptions
### Added
* JWT based API authentication
* Configurable logging
* Consolidated LLM Inference via `ModelClient` class
* Dynamic logging configurable via environment variables
### Changed
* Deriver & Dialectic API to use Hybrid Memory Architecture
* Metamessages are not strictly tied to a message
* Database provisioning is a separate script instead of happening on startup
* Consolidated `session/chat` and `session/chat/stream` endpoints
## Previous Releases
For a complete history of all releases, see our [GitHub Releases](https://github.com/plastic-labs/honcho/tags) page.
[Python SDK](https://pypi.org/project/honcho-ai/)
### Added
* Scopes: `Honcho.scope()` / `HonchoAio.scope()` get-or-create a named visibility boundary, `Honcho.scopes()` lists them, and a `Scope` object adds/removes sessions, lists membership, and reads backfill `status()`. `Honcho.session(..., scopes=[...])` joins a new session to scopes at creation. Requires a Honcho server with the matching API support (Honcho v3.1.0+).
* `scope` option on `Peer.chat()` / `chat_stream()`, representation, session context, and workspace search. A single scope answers from that scope's collection and card; a list of scopes restricts recall to the union of their member sessions (explicit-only). Mutually exclusive with `session` / `sessions` / `filters`.
* Workspace-level chat: `Honcho.chat()` / `HonchoAio.chat()` and `chat_stream()` ask a question across every peer in the workspace, with the same `session`, `scope`, `reasoning_level`, and `response_format` options as `Peer.chat()`. Requires a Honcho server with the matching API support (Honcho v3.1.0+).
### Changed
* `ConclusionScope` is renamed to `ConclusionsView`. The old name remains as a deprecated alias for one more minor version. "Scope" now means a named set of sessions (`Scope`); these objects are views over one observer/observed pair.
### Added
* `response_format` on `Peer.chat()` / `PeerAio.chat()` and `Peer.chat_stream()` / `PeerAio.chat_stream()`, for constraining a dialectic answer to a schema. Pass a Pydantic model class to get a validated instance back (parsed via `model_validate_json`), or a raw JSON Schema dict to get the JSON string as-is. Overloads type the return precisely, so a model class narrows to that model and a dict narrows to `str`. On the streaming variants, chunks stay raw text that accumulates to a JSON string — parse it after the stream completes. Requires a Honcho server with the matching API support (Honcho v3.0.12+).
* `response_format` field on `DialecticParams`.
### Added
* `ConclusionLevel` type (`explicit`, `deductive`, `inductive`, `contradiction`) and a `level` field on `Conclusion`, exposing the reasoning level the server already tracked but previously stripped from responses.
* `filters` parameter on `ConclusionScope.list()` and `ConclusionScope.query()` (sync and async), passed through to the same dynamic server-side filter logic as `peers()`/`sessions()`/`messages()`. Filter explicit-only conclusions with `filters={"level": "explicit"}`, or by any other supported field/operator. Requires a Honcho server with the matching API support (Honcho v3.0.11+).
### Fixed
* Scope-managed filter keys (`observer`, `observed`, `session`) are now rejected with a clear `ValueError` if passed in `filters`, instead of silently overriding the scope and returning conclusions from a different peer pair. Use `peer.conclusions` / `conclusions_of(target)` and the `session=` parameter instead. `session_id` remains a valid filter on `query()`.
### Added
* `page`, `size`, and `reverse` pagination parameters on `Honcho.workspaces()` and `HonchoAio.workspaces()`, closing the gap from 2.1.0 which added these to other list methods but not to `workspaces()`. Honoring `reverse` on the workspace/peer/session list routes also requires a Honcho server with the matching API fix; older servers silently ignore the parameter.
* `peers` parameter on `Honcho.session()` and `HonchoAio.session()` — attach peers to a session at creation time instead of needing a follow-up `session.add_peers()` call. Accepts the same shapes as `Session.add_peers` (peer ID string, `Peer` object, list of either, or tuples with `SessionPeerConfig`).
### Changed
* `WorkspaceCreateParams`, `PeerCreateParams`, and `SessionCreateParams` now accept IDs up to 512 characters (was 100), matching the server-side schema change in Honcho v3.0.7.
### Fixed
* Broadened HTTP retry logic to cover `httpx.NetworkError` and `httpx.RemoteProtocolError` in addition to `httpx.TimeoutException` and `httpx.ConnectError`, improving resilience against transient network failures
### Added
* `created_at` property on `Peer` and `Session` objects
* `is_active` property on `Session` objects
* `get_message(message_id)` method on `Session` (sync and async) to fetch a single message by ID
* `page`, `size`, and `reverse` pagination parameters on all list methods
### Changed
* **Breaking**: `peer()` and `session()` now always make a get-or-create API call — no more lazy initialization
* Response configuration models now tolerate unknown fields from newer servers for forward compatibility
### Fixed
* Sync and async `Session.get_metadata()`, `get_configuration()`, and `refresh()` now refresh cached `created_at` and `is_active` values along with metadata and configuration
* `honcho.__version__` now derives from package metadata, with a source-checkout fallback, so it stays aligned with released package versions
### Changed
* All input models now reject unknown fields via strict Pydantic validation (`extra="forbid"`). Previously, misspelled or extraneous fields were silently ignored. Now a `ValidationError` is raised with the unrecognized field name.
### Added
* `set_peer_card` method
### Changed
* `card` is now `get_card` with `card` kept for backwards compatibility and marked as deprecated
### Added
* `ConclusionScope` object for CRUD operations on conclusions (renamed from observations)
* Representation configuration support
### Changed
* Observations renamed to Conclusions across the SDK
* Major SDK refactoring and cleanup
* Simplified method signatures throughout
* Representation endpoints now return `string` instead of old Representation object
### Removed
* Standalone types module (now uses honcho-core types)
* Representation object
### Added
* metadata and configuration fields to Workspace, Peer, Session, and Message objects
* Session Clone methods
* Peer level get\_context method
* `ObservationScope` object to perform CRUD operations on observations
* Representation object for WorkingRepresentations
### Changed
* methods that take IDs, can all optionally take an object of the same type
### Added
* Delete workspace method
### Changed
* message\_id of `Summary` model is a string nanoid
* Get Context can return Peer Card & Peer Representation
### Added
* Get Peer Card method
* Update Message metadata method
* Session level deriver status methods
* Delete session message
### Fixed
* Dialectic Stream returns Iterators
* Type warnings
### Changed
* Pagination class to match core implementation
### Added
* getSummaries API returning structured summaries
* Webhook support
### Changed
* Messages can take an optional `created_at` value, defaulting to the current
time (UTC ISO 8601)
### Added
* Filter parameter to various endpoints
### Fixed
* Honcho util import paths
### Added
* Get/poll deriver queue status endpoints added to workspace
* Added endpoint to upload files as messages
### Removed
* Removed peer messages in accordance with Honcho 2.1.0
### Changed
* Updated chat endpoint to use singular `query` in accordance with Honcho 2.1.0
### Fixed
* Properly handle AsyncClient
[TypeScript SDK](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@honcho-ai/sdk)
### Added
* Scopes: `honcho.scope()` get-or-creates a named visibility boundary, `honcho.scopes()` lists them, and a `Scope` object adds/removes sessions, lists membership, and reads backfill `status()`. `honcho.session({ scopes: [...] })` joins a new session to scopes at creation. Requires a Honcho server with the matching API support (Honcho v3.1.0+).
* `scope` option on `peer.chat()` / `chatStream()`, representation, session context, and workspace search. A single scope answers from that scope's collection and card; a list of scopes restricts recall to the union of their member sessions (explicit-only). Mutually exclusive with `session` / `sessions` / `filters`.
* Workspace-level chat: `honcho.chat()` / `honcho.chatStream()` ask a question across every peer in the workspace, with the same `session`, `scope`, `reasoningLevel`, and `responseFormat` options as `peer.chat()`. Requires a Honcho server with the matching API support (Honcho v3.1.0+).
### Changed
* `ConclusionScope` is renamed to `ConclusionsView`. The old name remains as a deprecated alias for one more minor version. "Scope" now means a named set of sessions (`Scope`); these objects are views over one observer/observed pair.
### Added
* `responseFormat` option on `peer.chat()` and `peer.chatStream()`, for constraining a dialectic answer to a schema. Pass a Zod schema to get a parsed, validated result back, or a raw JSON Schema object to get the JSON string as-is. Overloads type the return precisely, so a Zod schema narrows to its inferred type and a plain object narrows to `string`. On `chatStream()`, chunks stay raw text that accumulates to a JSON string — parse it after the stream completes. Requires a Honcho server with the matching API support (Honcho v3.0.12+).
### Added
* `ConclusionLevel` type (`explicit`, `deductive`, `inductive`, `contradiction`) and a `level` field on `Conclusion`, exposing the reasoning level the server already tracked but previously stripped from responses.
* `filters` option on `conclusions.list()` and `conclusions.query()`, passed through to the same dynamic server-side filter logic as the other list endpoints. Filter explicit-only conclusions with `{ filters: { level: 'explicit' } }`, or by any other supported field/operator. Requires a Honcho server with the matching API support (Honcho v3.0.11+).
### Fixed
* Scope-managed filter keys (`observer`, `observed`, `session`) are now rejected with a clear error if passed in `filters`, instead of silently overriding the scope and returning conclusions from a different peer pair. Use `peer.conclusions` / `peer.conclusionsOf(target)` and the dedicated `session` option instead. `session_id` remains a valid filter on `query()`.
### Added
* `peers` option on `Honcho.session()` — attach peers to a session at creation time instead of needing a follow-up `session.addPeers()` call. Accepts the same `PeerAddition` shape as `session.addPeers()` (peer ID strings, `Peer` objects, arrays of either, or a record with per-peer `observe_me`/`observe_others` config).
### Changed
* ID validation in `validation.ts` now accepts workspace, peer, and session IDs up to 512 characters (was 100), matching the server-side schema change in Honcho v3.0.7.
### Fixed
* `Honcho.workspaces()` now actually forwards the `reverse` option to the server. The 2.1.0 changelog listed `workspaces()` among the list methods that gained `reverse`, but `client.ts` was missing the field on the params type and request builder, so the option was silently dropped. Honoring `reverse` on the workspace/peer/session list routes also requires a Honcho server with the matching API fix; older servers silently ignore the parameter.
### Fixed
* Broadened fetch error retry logic to catch all `TypeError` network failures (connection resets, DNS errors, etc.) instead of only those with `'fetch'` in the message, improving resilience across runtimes (Node, Bun, browsers)
### Added
* `createdAt` property on `Peer` and `Session` wrapper objects
* `isActive` property on `Session` wrapper objects
* `getMessage(messageId)` method on `Session` to fetch a single message by ID
* `Peer.representation()`, `Session.representation()`, and `Session.context()` now accept `Message` objects for `searchQuery`
* `page`, `size`, and `reverse` pagination controls on all list methods
### Changed
* **Breaking**: `searchQuery` removed from top-level `context()` options — use `representationOptions.searchQuery` instead:
```typescript theme={null}
// Before (v2.0.x)
await session.context({ searchQuery: "..." });
// After (v2.1.0)
await session.context({ representationOptions: { searchQuery: "..." } });
```
* List methods (`peers()`, `sessions()`, `messages()`, `workspaces()`) support both the new options object and the legacy raw-filter form
* Representation search options now accept strings and content-like objects, including `Message` instances, while rejecting whitespace-only or invalid runtime inputs
* **Breaking**: `peer()` and `session()` now always make a get-or-create API call — no more lazy initialization. If you relied on constructing SDK objects without triggering a network request, note that every `peer()` and `session()` call now hits the API:
```typescript theme={null}
// Before (v2.0.x) — no API call
const session = honcho.session("my-session");
// After (v2.1.0) — makes a get-or-create API call
const session = await honcho.session("my-session");
```
* Response configuration models now tolerate unknown fields from newer servers for forward compatibility
* Moved `@types/node` from `dependencies` to `devDependencies`
### Fixed
* `uploadFile()` now rejects unsupported top-level binary/object inputs and only validates inputs the serializer can actually upload
* `uploadFile()` now serializes message configuration using API field names, matching `addMessages()`
* Session fetch methods now refresh cached `createdAt` and `isActive` values alongside metadata and configuration
### Changed
* Client constructor now rejects unknown options via `.strict()` Zod validation. Previously, misspelled options (e.g., `baseUrl` instead of `baseURL`) were silently ignored, causing the SDK to fall back to defaults. Now a `ZodError` is thrown with the unrecognized key name.
* All input schemas now use `.strict()` validation to reject unknown fields.
* `FileUploadSchema.configuration` now uses `MessageConfigurationSchema` instead of open record type.
### Fixed
* README example used `baseUrl` instead of `baseURL`.
### Added
* `setPeerCard` method
### Changed
* `card` is now `getCard` with `card` kept for backwards compatibility and marked as deprecated
### Added
* `ConclusionScope` object for CRUD operations on conclusions (renamed from observations)
* Representation configuration support
### Changed
* Observations renamed to Conclusions across the SDK
* Major SDK refactoring and cleanup
* Simplified method signatures throughout
* Representation endpoints now return `string` instead of old Representation object
### Fixed
* Pagination `this` binding issue
### Removed
* Representation object
* Stainless "core" SDK -- this SDK is now standalone
### Added
* metadata and configuration fields to Workspace, Peer, Session, and Message objects
* Session Clone methods
* Peer level get\_context method
* `ObservationScope` object to perform CRUD operations on observations
* Representation object for WorkingRepresentations
### Changed
* methods that take IDs, can all optionally take an object of the same type
### Added
* Delete workspace method
### Changed
* message\_id of `Summary` model is a string nanoid
* Get Context can return Peer Card & Peer Representation
### Added
* Get Peer Card method
* Update Message metadata method
* Session level deriver status methods
* Delete session message
### Fixed
* Dialectic Stream returns Iterators
* Type warnings
### Changed
* Pagination class to match core implementation
### Added
* getSummaries API returning structured summaries
* Webhook support
### Changed
* Messages can take an optional `created_at` value, defaulting to the current
time (UTC ISO 8601)
### Added
* linting via Biome
* Adding filter parameter to various endpoints
### Fixed
* Order of parameters in `getSessions` endpoint
### Added
* Get/poll deriver queue status endpoints added to workspace
* Added endpoint to upload files as messages
### Removed
* Removed peer messages in accordance with Honcho 2.1.0
### Changed
* Updated chat endpoint to use singular `query` in accordance with Honcho 2.1.0
### Fixed
* Create default workspace on Honcho client instantiation
* Simplified Honcho client import path
[Honcho CLI](https://pypi.org/project/honcho-cli/)
### Added
* A TTY notice when a newer `honcho-cli` is on PyPI (`uv tool upgrade honcho-cli`). Skipped in JSON mode; disable with `HONCHO_NO_UPDATE_CHECK`
### Fixed
* `--setup` for openai-compatible writes `EMBEDDING_MODEL_CONFIG__OVERRIDES__BASE_URL` into the profile `.env` alongside `LLM_OPENAI_BASE_URL` (#1068)
* `--setup` API key prompts echo `*` per character so a paste is visibly received instead of a blank getpass field
### Added
* `honcho start`, `honcho stop`, and `honcho status` — run a personal Honcho stack in Docker (API, deriver, Postgres, Redis). Profiles live under `~/.honcho/profiles/`. First start pins `ghcr.io/plastic-labs/honcho:latest` by digest and copies the image `config.toml`. Optional `--setup basic` / `--setup advanced` wizard writes LLM overrides to `.env` (#1029)
* `honcho session view` — session transcript table (`--last N`, `--page N --size M`, `--all`, `--reverse`, `--ids`, peer filter via `-p`). Content is shown verbatim, timestamps are normalized to UTC, and the command is read-only: unlike the other session commands it never get-or-creates the session (#1006)
### Fixed
* `honcho message list --last N` no longer stops at the first page of 50 — it walks pages to fill the requested window (#1006)
### Added
* Device-code OAuth login for managed Honcho servers. `honcho init` now offers browser-based login (RFC 8628 device authorization grant) when the host advertises the device grant in its OAuth authorization-server metadata; tokens are persisted to `~/.honcho/config.json` and auto-refreshed (#891)
* `HONCHO_CONFIG_DIR` environment variable for pointing the CLI at an alternate config directory (#891)
### Changed
* An OAuth grant now records the host it was minted against and is ignored — neither used nor refreshed — when `base_url` points elsewhere, so a staging grant is never sent to production. A live OAuth token takes precedence over a stored `apiKey`, and a dead grant degrades to the saved key with a warning instead of aborting. Device login no longer deletes the shared `apiKey`, which sibling tools read from the same config file (#891)
### Fixed
* Declare `click` as an explicit dependency. The CLI imported `click` directly but relied on it being pulled in transitively, so installs without it on the path could fail at runtime (#787)
### Added
* Initial release of `honcho-cli` — a terminal for inspecting and managing a Honcho deployment (#424)
* `workspace`, `peer`, `session`, `message`, `conclusion`, and `config` command groups for managing resources against any Honcho server
* `init` onboarding flow that prompts for and persists connection settings, with flag/env-var pre-seeding for non-interactive use
* Per-command flags, environment variables, and a config file for pointing the CLI at different servers (local, self-hosted, or hosted)
* Rich terminal output and an agent-usage mode for scripting against the CLI
* Documentation and an agent skill for the CLI (#589)
## Getting Help
If you encounter issues using the Honcho API or its SDKs:
1. Open an issue on [GitHub](https://github.com/plastic-labs/honcho/issues)
2. Join our [Discord community](http://discord.gg/honcho) for support