Semantic Session Guardrails: OMNI v0.5.8-rc1

This is a release candidate note, kept as project history. For what shipped, see the journal index or the releases.

Kicking off the v0.5.8 release cycle, rc1 brings major advancements in session safety and test suite reliability.

Semantic Session Guardrails

We are taking proactive steps to protect your codebase during autonomous operations:

Hot File Detection: Automatically triggers a SessionEnd hook when active files show abnormal mutation frequency, prompting agents to review before committing.
Build Failure Preservation: The BuildDistiller now preserves full CommandOutput for build failures (non-zero exit codes) in the collapse pipeline, ensuring agents see exact errors.
Diagnostic Context: The PreBuild hook now runs cargo check to surface compiler errors early in the session, reducing wasted tokens on broken states.

Passthrough & Smart Thresholding

OMNI_PASSTHROUGH: We’ve added support for raw output emission via environment variables for manual debugging.
Smart Bypass: Automatic distillation bypass for small configuration files and content under a 2000-token minimum threshold, keeping fast tasks fast.

Test Suite Modernization

Under the hood, we’ve systematically refactored the entire Rust test suite (~300 tests) to align with modern idiomatic standards. This includes transitioning to behavioral function names (returns_*, preserves_*) and purging all remaining mixed-language legacy code.