v0.33.0

2026-08-15 · Sugartown monorepo — apps/web, docs, tooling

What this release is

Two things happened between 0.32.0 and 0.33.0. A layer of process-governance machinery was built, and then it was removed again. Alongside that, a four-month-old content bug was found and fixed: 110 published documents had been invisible to every logged-out reader since March.

This release is unusual in that a substantial part of what it records no longer exists. Those entries are marked in the CHANGELOG rather than deleted, because the work happened and the reasoning is worth keeping.

What changed

110 documents were invisible for 158 days

Sanity treats a dot in a document _id as a path segment. The WordPress import minted ids in the form wp.<type>.<id>, so every document it created was unreachable to unauthenticated readers. 110 published documents were affected.

The fix migrated 111 ids to <type>-<slug> and rewrote 612 references across 39 field paths in a single atomic transaction. It was verified by three measurements: 0 hidden documents, 0 dangling references, and reference-edge count conserved at 1,835.

A viewer token had been shipped to every browser as a workaround. It is removed from production bundles and revoked. validate:taxonomy now passes anonymously in CI, which was the acceptance test for the work.

A governance layer was built, then withdrawn

Between 2026-07-21 and 2026-08-13 the repo accumulated a register-and-validator layer over its own engineering conventions: a gate taxonomy with tier registers, a requirement to run a verification review before building any gate, a word cap on the instruction surface, a governance data layer with its own schema and three validators, and CI annotations for warn-only gates.

All of it is gone at 0.33.0. The generated governance.json had zero consumers anywhere in the app. The /platform/governance-draft page existed only to host a coverage tally that had itself been retired for being undated and, in three claims, measurably false.

Nothing was deleted outright. Everything moved to zArchive/2026-08-sug284-governance-layer/ by git mv, so full history and a resurrection path are preserved. The removal used forward commits only, with no history rewrite.

Three things were kept deliberately. The narrative documents under docs/ai/agentic-caucus/ remain as inert reference. The Tier 1/2/3 model in human-gate-conventions.md stays, because the Content Write Gate and the Human-Publishes Rule depend on it for their approval mechanism. And the Instruction & Rule File Write Gate stays, having gated the removal's own edits to CLAUDE.md.

One priority queue instead of two

docs/backlog/sugartown-backlog-priorities.md is deleted, 499 lines of it. Linear is now the single priority queue with no second copy to reconcile. Size-aware routing replaces the stack across CLAUDE.md, the /new-epic skill, the epic template, and both release prompts.

Epic decomposition has a defined shape

Epics with more than 5 Scope items now decompose into a scope-to-phase mapping recorded in the epic doc. Two revisions landed before release. Numbered phases were dropped as a decomposition trigger, because nearly every Sugartown epic has them and the clause made the Scope-item threshold inoperative. Linear sub-issues were withdrawn as the mechanism: they have no backlog doc by design, so each one filed turned CI red, and they consumed a free-plan issue budget the workspace had already exhausted.

Smaller fixes

collectLinear() silently truncated at 250 issues on a team of 268, and dropped every triage-state issue from its buckets. It now pages the full result set.

The AUTOMATED CHECKS · 18 tile on /platform/governance claimed those checks were "enforced by code and pre-commit hooks". Six run at pre-commit; the rest are CI only. The tile now says so.

Not in this release

The coverage tally is not published anywhere. It was removed from /platform/governance, moved to a noindex draft page, and then that page was removed too. No replacement shipped.
validate:urls, validate:filters and validate:taxonomy remain structurally unprobeable. They judge published Sanity documents rather than repo files, so no file in this repo can make them fail. The refactor that would change this, separating fetching from judging, is not scheduled.
No changes to apps/studio, packages/design-system, or apps/storybook this cycle.

Validator state at release

pnpm validate:tokens — 655 unique tokens, 112 CSS files scanned, all references resolve. pnpm validate:tokens --strict-colors — no hardcoded color values. pnpm validate:style-mirror — all enforced style + component mirrors byte-identical. pnpm lint — 6 tasks successful, 6 total. pnpm test:smoke — 5/5 Playwright route specs pass. CI run 31879933820 — success, both jobs, all 14 steps.