Release notes — 3.2.6rc1 (internal Release Candidate)

For the existing Spec Kitty operator/maintainer deciding whether to pull this candidate into a test environment.

Warning

3.2.6rc1 is a Release Candidate — an internal, delta build published for validation, NOT an official 3.2.6 release. It ships as a GitHub prerelease and to PyPI as a PEP 440 prerelease, so ordinary installers skip it unless you explicitly opt in with --pre. Do not use it for production or general rollout. The last official release remains v3.2.5; when 3.2.6 is finalized its changelog section supersedes this candidate.

Note

Update 2026-09-03 — the release-critical work that remained after this candidate has fully landed. At rc1 time, a set of release-blocking bugs (the 3.2.6 execution DAG, tracker #3692) still gated the final tag. That book is now empty — all twenty DAG nodes are closed, #3692 is closed, and the milestone stands at 0 remaining work items. This candidate's highlights below are the rc1 snapshot; the finalized 3.2.6 changelog section is the authoritative record of everything the release ships.

Install for testing

This candidate is opt-in. Standard installs will not pick it up without --pre.

pipx install --pre spec-kitty-cli==3.2.6rc1
# or, inside an existing environment:
pip install --pre spec-kitty-cli==3.2.6rc1

Highlights since v3.2.5

The operator-facing changes worth exercising in this candidate:

  • Breaking — built-in doctrine content relocated to packs/built-in/ with no compatibility shim (mission relocate-builtin-doctrine-packs). Repoint any reference that still targets the old src/doctrine/<kind>/built-in/ path.
  • Breaking — local beads/fp tracker sync now requires a recorded egress decision (mission tracker-egress-refusal-3108). A binding that never recorded hosted-sync consent stops syncing on upgrade until you record tracker.egress: permitted or sync.enabled: true.
  • Breaking — the rtk-search-tooling toolguide is removed, and the 3.2.6_retire_rtk_search_tooling upgrade migration strips it from projects that had it activated (it runs automatically on spec-kitty upgrade and is safe to re-run).
  • Breaking — org packs with an unrecognised agent-profile or DRG key now fail to load (mission doctrine-silence-guards). Run spec-kitty doctor doctrine --json and check skipped_profiles before you upgrade.
  • charter synthesize is now non-destructive — it preserves backed governance content by default, with --prune as the explicit opt-in and --dry-run to preview (mission charter-synthesize-reconciliation; #3270 P0, folds #2777 / #3052). The implement / next boundary no longer hard-blocks until you resynthesize.
  • Approving a work package after a rejection now sticks with no override flag required (mission review-verdict-write-integrity; #3044) — the reject → fix → approve cycle no longer forces --skip-review-artifact-check.
  • Timestamps Spec Kitty writes into your project are now correct aware-UTC instead of local time mislabelled as UTC (mission kernel-clock-single-door; #3305, closes #3289).
  • CLI UX: shell autocompletion, a -h short-help alias, and alphabetical command listing (#2232, #2234, #2235) — additive, with no behavior change to existing commands.

Full changelog

These highlights are a curated subset. For the complete, factual list of everything in this candidate — every Added, Fixed, Changed, and Breaking Changes entry — see the [3.2.6rc1] section of the canonical changelog.

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