Upgrading

Breaking changes and migration notes for evener.

Before shutting down an older session

Saved session trees with legacy delegate lifecycle state or watches addressed through legacy delegate jobs cannot resume on the current runtime. Preserve their history and workspace before shutting down the old daemon. A hub restart does not replace that daemon. evener migrate moves supported layouts and provider configuration; it does not convert this rejected runtime state.

The refusal identifies legacy_delegate_state or legacy_delegate_watch_state. Keep the original state intact. Do not remove job or watch journals to bypass the check. Current-format saved sessions can restore, but readable history alone does not establish compatibility.

1. Record the old build and effective state paths. Finish essential work on the old runtime before the maintenance shutdown.
2. Make a consistent private backup, then run the provider-free history restore rehearsal. Inspect a copy, never the only surviving state.
3. If restoration rejects legacy state, keep that copy for history. Review the workspace and external job outcomes, then start a new task with a written handoff: completed work, remaining work, relevant paths, and uncertain effects. Do not use --resume, --resume-last, or --resume-with for this path.

For CLI continuation, create a new private state directory outside the backup. Run this in Bash after setting workspace to the existing working directory and model to a configured model reference:

(
  set -euo pipefail
  umask 077
  fresh_state=$(mktemp -d "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/evener-continuation.XXXXXX")
  printf 'Keep this new session state: %s\n' "$fresh_state"
  evener --state-dir "$fresh_state" --dir "$workspace" --model "$model" \
    'Review the preserved workspace and my handoff before continuing.'
)

This starts a new session and can call the provider and run tools. It does not import the rejected session's history, jobs, delegates, watches, or queue. Keep the new state directory as well as the backup; move it into your backup policy before temporary-directory cleanup. Check the task's actual files and saved transcript before treating the continuation as successful.

Unreleased — the evener tui subcommand is removed

The interactive terminal dashboard (evener tui, cmd/evener-tui) is gone. The non-interactive CLI and the web and native clients are unchanged. evener tui is now an ordinary unknown first word: it is not a subcommand, so it runs as a prompt (or, with no prompt on an interactive terminal, prints usage and exits 1). Use the web UI served by evener hub, the native app, or the non-interactive CLI (evener "<prompt>", evener serve, evener doctor).

Unreleased — evener-dev is no longer installed

evener-dev is repository dev and test tooling, not part of an install. install.sh, make install and evener upgrade now install evener alone. Build evener-dev from a checkout with make build-dev when you need it.

Release archives no longer carry evener-dev: they hold evener alone. No tagged evener release ever required evener-dev in the archive — v0.2.0, the first evener-named release, already installs evener alone (installBinaries) — so the only evener upgrade that still needs it is a development/snapshot build from the transition window between the binary consolidation and the evener-only installBinaries; those have aged out, and such a build must reinstall with install.sh to move past them. An evener-dev that an earlier install left in ~/.local/share/evener/bin (and its ~/.local/bin link) is no longer updated. Remove it if you don't use it:

rm -f ~/.local/bin/evener-dev ~/.local/share/evener/bin/evener-dev

Unreleased — Tool purpose param renamed to intent

The shared tool parameter that carries the agent's stated reason for a call was renamed from purpose to intent. New tool calls carry intent only. Readers fall back to purpose when intent is absent, so transcripts recorded before 2026-08-29 still render their tool-intent line in the hub and evener doctor.

Unreleased — Binary consolidation

Summary

All standalone evener-<x> binaries are consolidated into two binaries:

Binary	Subcommands
evener	serve, hub, doctor, migrate, openai, upgrade, plugin, launch-check
evener-dev	dev, fuzz-harvest, fuzzcov, fuzzregistry, internalcheck, tomlcheck, transcript-v2-upgrade

The five old binaries (evener-hub, evener-tui, evener-doctor, evener-migrate, and the dev/test tooling CLIs) are gone. Their functionality lives on as subcommands.

Migration

Replace every old binary invocation with the subcommand form:

# Before
evener-hub
evener-tui
evener-doctor locate <session-id>
evener-migrate

# After
evener hub
evener doctor locate <session-id>
evener migrate

(The evener-tui row of this historical migration became evener tui; that subcommand was later removed — see the top of this file.)

Dev/test tooling:

# Before
evener-fuzz-harvest
evener-fuzzcov
evener-internalcheck

# After
evener-dev fuzz-harvest
evener-dev fuzzcov
evener-dev internalcheck

Install

make install now installs evener alone instead of five binaries (see "evener-dev is no longer installed" above). If you have old binaries on your PATH, remove them:

rm ~/.local/bin/evener-hub ~/.local/bin/evener-tui \
   ~/.local/bin/evener-doctor ~/.local/bin/evener-migrate

The self-update (evener upgrade) path installs the new evener automatically.

Release archives

Release archives now contain one binary (evener) instead of five. The archive name (evener_<os>_<arch>.tar.gz) and directory layout are unchanged. install.sh installs evener from them.

Go version

The Go toolchain requirement is bumped from 1.25.x to 1.27.0. go.work and all go.mod files declare go 1.27.0. CI uses Go 1.27.0.

golangci-lint

golangci-lint is bumped from v2.12.2 to v2.13.1 (built with Go 1.27). Run make tools to install the new version. The govet inline analyzer is disabled in .golangci.yml — it produces false positives on test helper functions that are deliberately not inlined.

Makefile targets

Removed targets (functionality now in make build / make build-dev):

• make build-tui
• make build-doctor
• make build-migrate

(make build-hub is retained as an alias for build-runtime.)

New targets:

• make build-dev — builds the evener-dev dev/test infrastructure binary
• make build-all — builds both evener and evener-dev

Scripts

All scripts under scripts/ that invoked evener-<x> binaries now use evener <subcommand> or evener-dev <subcommand>.

Library packages

The cmd/evener-<x> directories are now library packages (not package main) with a Run(args []string, stdin io.Reader, stdout, stderr io.Writer) int entry point. The dispatch binaries (cmd/evener, cmd/evener-dev/bin) call these Run functions.

Self-invocation

The TUI previously spawned evener-hub as a separate process. It now spawns evener hub (the evener binary with the hub subcommand). Binary resolution via binresolve.Resolve uses the evener binary name.