Changelog

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Signup-first activation

• The primary Free journey now creates a workspace before guiding the user through source selection, secure CLI login, the exact audit command, and a live waiting state for the first push.
• The onboarding state survives refreshes and sign-ins, records durable activation milestones without CLI telemetry, and includes deliberate snapshot-limit recovery.
• Secure setup uses xerg login --replace, which verifies a new workspace key before atomically replacing any existing stored credential.
• Activation reporting keeps historical workspace/revenue cohorts intact and excludes signups from 24-hour conversion denominators until their full observation window has elapsed.
• The homepage now pairs its primary workspace CTA with one terminal-agent setup prompt and a separate no-agent CLI fallback.
• Xerg’s canonical skill supports cold fetches, and both current and legacy well-known discovery formats serve byte-identical skill content with generated integrity metadata.

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Certified Hermes trace enrichment

• New xerg collect hermes command receives traces-only OTLP/HTTP protobuf on loopback for the exact certified briancaffey/hermes-otel commit. Xerg prints configuration but never installs or modifies the plugin.
• Hermes captures require state.db and use a persistent owner-only correlation key. Identifiers are HMACed before persistence; a moved capture without its key remains descriptive and cannot split economics.
• The sanitizer drops prompts, responses, conversation content, invocation parameters, arguments/results, commands, paths, goals, summaries, approval text, skill paths, user IDs, and arbitrary attributes even if upstream privacy settings are wrong.
• The first-party observer stays primary. Trace evidence can enrich ancestry, approvals, skills, tools, and delegation; observer/trace request conflicts restore the original state aggregate.
• Certified plugin prompt totals are normalized into uncached input plus separate cache-read/write buckets before reconciliation. Optional observer and trace enrichment stay outside the audit comparison identity, so exact evidence does not change the authoritative audit ID.
• The collector prints equivalent environment variables for non-default HERMES_HOME profiles, where the pinned plugin’s fixed ~/.hermes YAML lookup would otherwise miss profile-local configuration.
• Audit Push Payload v3, hosted storage, dashboards, MCP, finding kinds, recommendations, and failure gates remain unchanged.

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Common local analysis surface

• Hermes and OpenClaw now share explicit analysisCoverage, neutral toolActivity, and workloadEconomics local blocks with deterministic lineage handling.
• Complete first-party Hermes observer API evidence can split a state.db aggregate only when request count and input/output/cache buckets match exactly. Incomplete, dropped, ambiguous, or conflicting evidence stays aggregate.
• Authoritative cost is allocated across exact requests without changing request totals, token buckets, spend, cost source, or audit ID. Only reconciled requests enter sequence-dependent detectors.
• Content-free prompt-size counters, tool-result byte evidence, compression counts, state-only tool inventory, and branch/delegation lineage improve local context and orchestration coverage.
• When no request sequence is eligible, reports say sequence-dependent monetary findings were not evaluated instead of implying no inefficiency.

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Current OpenClaw evidence and isolated trace collection

• Modern OpenClaw session transcripts now retain ordered tool names, exact execution counts, serialized input/result byte sizes without content, compaction evidence, and root/child lineage with deterministic cycle handling.
• OpenClaw reports add separate local Tool activity and Workload economics sections. These neutral blocks do not create findings, recommendations, savings claims, waste totals, or CI failures.
• New xerg collect openclaw command receives traces-only OTLP/HTTP protobuf on loopback, sanitizes each request before persistence, and audits the bounded owner-only capture after shutdown. It never changes OpenClaw configuration or pushes automatically.
• Existing captures can be audited with --otlp-file. This source is isolated from transcripts, logs, other runtimes, and remote modes so economics cannot be double counted.
• The collector enforces 16 MiB request, 256 MiB capture, and 100,000 span limits; hashes correlation IDs before persistence; rejects content attributes; preserves interrupted captures; and never overwrites an output file.
• Xerg Event Payload v2 adds optional modelCallId and toolCallId correlation with strict same-payload and same-run validation. Version 1 remains accepted. Audit Push Payload v3 and all hosted schemas remain unchanged.

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Hermes state database and local mechanical analysis

• Xerg now reads Hermes v0.17 through v0.19 state.db directly in query-only mode, including schema 16 session aggregates, schema 20 model usage, and schema 22 task usage. Unknown compatible future columns are ignored.
• Aggregate request counts now reconcile with Hermes without multiplying aggregate token or cost values, and sequence-dependent monetary detectors ignore observations that cannot support sequence claims.
• Compression continuations become one logical run while branches and delegated sessions remain separate. Positive actual cost is observed; positive estimated cost is estimated; missing or zero cost is repriced where token data permits.
• The optional xergai/hermes-observer plugin records content-free local tool, terminal, API-error, delegation, and lifecycle mechanics. It never adds economic calls or sends data to Xerg Cloud.
• Hermes reports can include a separate local Mechanical efficiency section. Only directly observed repeated identical tool inputs and discarded terminal output can become findings; other shapes remain neutral metrics.
• Mechanical data is excluded from recommendations, audit gates, audit IDs, pushed payloads, hosted storage, and MCP. The public wire contracts remain unchanged.
• The minimum runtime is Node 22.13.0, the first Node 22 release where node:sqlite no longer needs a startup flag.

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Free hosted workspaces

• Xerg now has a Free plan: a hosted workspace for up to 2 members with the last 30 days of pushed audit history, up to 100 stored audit snapshots per month, and workspace API keys. Local audits stay unlimited and account-free.
• Pro ($29 per member per month) adds full pushed audit history, unlimited audit pushes, unlimited workspace members, Ask Xerg, hosted MCP, Slack, and optimization policy drafts. Enterprise remains available for SSO/SAML, self-hosted deployment, and custom contracts.
• The dashboard shows your plan, monthly snapshot usage, and history window, and paid features display an in-place upgrade path instead of redirecting away.
• After a successful local audit, the CLI occasionally suggests saving audits in a free workspace (at most once per week, never in CI or machine-readable output, and never with telemetry). Successful pushes print a direct dashboard link to the pushed audit.
• xerg login now accepts Free workspace keys, and push errors explain member-limit or snapshot-quota issues precisely.
• @xerg/schemas gains the WorkspaceEntitlements wire contract backing the new GET /v1/entitlements endpoint.
• The design partner program has closed; see the pricing page for current plans.

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Silent-source visibility and a canonical finding-kind registry

• Audits now tell you when a detected source file contributes nothing: a count-only note appears whenever OpenClaw, Hermes, or Claude Code files produce no included calls in the audit window, instead of those files silently vanishing from the report.
• xerg doctor --verbose lists those zero-call files with their full local paths so you can inspect them. Paths stay local and never cross the push wire.
• Markdown reports from xerg audit --markdown now include the Notes section that was previously terminal-only.
• @xerg/schemas gains a canonical finding-kind registry (FINDING_KINDS, FINDING_KIND_META, and lookup helpers) as the single source for finding labels, categories, and implementation surfaces.
• Terminal and markdown taxonomy output now labels cache carryover and max mode concentration findings instead of showing raw kind identifiers.
• Hosted workspace: pushes create and recur Optimization backlog items again (wire v3 payloads were stored but skipped backlog upserts between July 6 and July 11), and provisional backlog items now persist real category and surface data for every finding kind.

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Cost per outcome and richer call economics

• New xerg outcome command: declare a success or failure outcome for a run or workflow. Declarations are stored locally, apply to future audits, override derived outcomes, and unlock cost-per-outcome reporting.
• Every normalized call now carries first-class economics fields across all sources: cache and reasoning tokens, stop reasons, tool names, and outcomes.
• Unified date-aware pricing engine with a much larger model catalog, replacing per-source pricing tables.
• Session-native waste detection: transcript-inferred retries, tool loops, context growth, cache thrash, and cadence-based idle spend.
• Push wire payload v3 adds token-economics and outcome rollups. Framework event payload v2 for xerg ingest.
• xerg doctor --verbose now reports field-extraction coverage per source, so you can see how much economic detail each source provides.

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OpenClaw transcript parsing fixes

• Parse the modern OpenClaw session transcript format, including normalized message.usage token fields.
• Calls that report a cost of zero (common on subscription or OAuth billing) are now treated as unobserved and priced by estimation instead of being counted as free.
• Added newer Anthropic models to the pricing catalog.
• Trajectory support bundles are excluded from detection to avoid double counting.
• xerg init reports cloud-setup failures as cloud-setup failures, noting that the local audit succeeded and is cached.

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Claude Code, ingest for any framework, and per-agent spend

• Claude Code is now a first-class local source: Xerg audits session transcripts from ~/.claude/projects/, with init and doctor support.
• New xerg ingest --file <payload.json> command audits any framework through a versioned JSON event payload.
• Per-agent spend attribution, including delegated sub-agent spend, in the CLI audit output, the hosted dashboard, and Ask Xerg.
• Content-addressed audit IDs make pushes idempotent; re-pushing the same audit no longer creates duplicates.
• The Xerg skill is now installable with npx skills add xergai/skills.
• Turnkey first run: a friendly Node version guard at startup, a non-blocking update notice when a newer CLI is published, Node 26 support, and @latest-pinned install commands everywhere.

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Slack integration

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Synced release train

• The CLI, schemas, and skill now publish on one synced version with automated drift checks.
• Refreshed npm, docs, and skill listing content.

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Accuracy hardening and a lighter install

• Provenance-aware findings, more conservative retry and loop waste detection, and normalized compare output.
• Removed the native SQLite dependency: local compare snapshots are stored as JSON, installs no longer need a native build step, and prompt dependencies were narrowed to what Xerg actually uses.
• Clearer Cursor and runtime waste taxonomy documentation.

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Skill runtime metadata

• Declared the Xerg skill runtime metadata used by registry security scans.
• Documented the local, remote, and hosted data-flow boundaries.

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Action queue and recommendation contract v2

• Recommendation payload upgraded to v2: ranked recommendations with stable IDs and structured scope labels, included on the push wire format.
• The terminal audit output now ends with an Action queue summary of top fix_now, test_next, and watch items.
• The same v2 recommendations power the hosted Optimizations backlog.

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Init-first onboarding

• New xerg init interactive first run: detects local sources, runs the first audit, caches a snapshot, and offers hosted follow-up.
• New xerg connect and xerg mcp-setup commands with shared auth resolution across local and hosted flows.
• Refreshed docs and skill messaging around free local audits with optional hosted setup.

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Hermes support

• Hermes is now a first-class local runtime alongside OpenClaw, with --runtime selection and local auto-detection.
• Runtime-aware compare and push labels, updated skill content, and refreshed docs.

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Daily spend and waste series

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Diagnostics improvements

• --verbose progress output for doctor and audit.
• No-data guidance now points to explicit local paths plus SSH and Railway inspection flows.
• Better Railway diagnostics and package-runner hints, so npx and pnpm dlx installs see the right follow-up commands.

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Bundled agent skill

• The Xerg agent skill ships inside the npm package and is published to ClawHub with each CLI release.
• Supported Node runtime is 22 or newer.

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Remote audits, push, and CI gates

• Remote OpenClaw audits over SSH and Railway: telemetry is pulled to your machine and analyzed locally.
• Public @xerg/schemas package: the MIT-licensed wire contract for pushed payloads.
• xerg login, xerg logout, and standalone xerg push for explicit hosted sync.
• Ranked recommendations in audit output.
• CI threshold flags with dedicated exit codes, including exit code 2 for no-data errors.

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Initial public beta

• Local OpenClaw audits in dollars: spend rollups and waste findings from gateway logs and session transcripts.
• xerg audit --compare for before and after reporting against the previous snapshot.
• xerg doctor source diagnostics.
• Supply-chain hardening for the published package.