Pseudolife-MCP: Skill for Claude Code

Release / publish procedure (five public surfaces)

GitHub releases, PyPI, the MCP registry, the GHCR container images, and the Claude Code plugin marketplace (.claude-plugin/marketplace.json + plugin/ — served straight from master, no publish step; users pull via /plugin marketplace update) all serve from this repo; a release touches them in this order (first done 2026-07-16, v0.8.0; GHCR images added 2026-08-14).

1. Docs currency pass before the cut — three checks, and (a) is the one that gets skipped because nothing fails when you miss it.

   (a) Absence — is the new behavior documented at all? List the behavior changes since the last tag (git log vN.N.N..HEAD, the CHANGELOG's [Unreleased] plus the pending changelog.d/ fragments) and ask of each: which user-facing page describes this? A capability with no guide entry contradicts nothing, so no guard test and no re-verify pass will ever surface it — only this question will. Schema v16–v18 shipped undocumented exactly this way, and 0.10.0's headline extraction change lived in the CHANGELOG alone until it was caught by hand at the release gate. A CHANGELOG entry is a record of a change, not documentation of a behavior. Corollary: never exclude a file from this pass on the strength of an earlier read that was looking for something else — a narrow check does not justify a broad exclusion.

   (b) Contradiction — do the existing claims still hold? The guard tests pin numbers (schema, identifiers), but framing drifts silently: the 2026-07-16 pass found 15 stale claims the guards can't see. Re-verify the drift-prone claim classes against code before any release: what's bundled/default (extractor model + size, embedding weights), the transport story (HTTP-first; shim = host-process only), lifecycle ownership (episodes are daemon-owned; briefing is the only hook), tool count/tiers and the hidden-tools-need-expand rule, shipped config defaults (surprise gate is permissive), image/install sizes, and any "can't / doesn't / no X" absolute — those age worst. Translated front doors (docs/i18n/README.{zh,ja,ko,pt-br,es}.md): if the narrative or quickstart in docs/i18n/README.source.md changed, bump its i18n-source version and re-run the translation subagents — the guard (tests/test_i18n_readme.py) pins code blocks + sync markers but cannot read prose. Surfaces: README, docs/guide/*.md (the user-facing guide pages the 2026-07-16 restructure moved the README's deep material into — configuration, retrieval, dreaming, episodes, memory-model, benchmarks; they carry the same drift-prone claims the README used to), CONTRIBUTING, SECURITY, evals/README, examples/ (CLAUDE.memory.md is injected into user CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md files — its tool surface must match exactly), docs/runbooks, ops/.env.example comments. The README is the PyPI description, so its fixes only reach PyPI at the next version.

   (c) Setup — does any change since the last tag leave the user a manual step? For each behavior change, ask what a user must do by hand after pseudolife-mcp update or a fresh install: a config edit, a login, a serve, a command to run once. If the answer is anything, the release waits until the installer or update does it (CLAUDE.md, "Install and update experience"). The 2026-10-04 passkey and test-login changes held the release after 0.16.1 this way.

2. First fold the changelog fragments: python ops/assemble_changelog.py moves every changelog.d/*.md entry into ## [Unreleased] (newest first) and deletes the fragment files. Review the folded section, then commit it with the cut. Fragments landed since 2026-10-09 exist only there until this runs.

   Version cut touches seven files together: the CHANGELOG (## [N.N.N] header over [Unreleased] — one fragile line; the tag↔section guard test exists because an adjacent edit once deleted it silently), pyproject.toml, the daemon image tag in both compose files (ops/docker-compose.yml and the packaged copy pseudolife_memory/compose/docker-compose.yml), both version fields in server.json, plugin/release.json (pinned to pyproject by tests/test_plugin_packaging.py; the release the hooks report for the version handshake. plugin/.claude-plugin/plugin.json carries no version: Claude Code keys its cache by it, and the marketplace ships the plugin from every master commit), and docs/atlas/atlas.json meta (pinned by tests/test_atlas_currency.py; re-verify the map's claims, don't just renumber it — update meta.verified to the date you actually checked). server.json (both fields) and the ops/docker-compose.yml daemon image tag are also pinned locally by tests/test_plugin_packaging.py::test_server_json_versions_match_pyproject (issue #185) — run it as part of the cut, before tagging, so a missed field fails in the suite rather than mid-CI. Nothing pins the packaged compose copy's tag to the version: check it by hand.