0.80.0-alpha · core 2026-10-22

The breadboard rules moved into the portable helper. stelow check breadboard <map> is now the single implementation of the map's contract and affordance checks. They used to live in repo-side JavaScript that a workflow never reached: the host spawns scripts/stelow for advance, and a project has no checkout, so the checks ran only where someone happened to have the repo. A rule that cannot run where the work happens is prose with a test.
advance runs the check on the selection transition. Leaving selection with a map that has an error is refused, with the findings on stderr; a map with only gaps advances and prints them. The workflow can no longer get past a broken map by forgetting to look.
The renderer no longer checks. render-diagram reads the verdict from the helper and refuses to draw a map with errors — a view and a gate must never disagree. --check and --strict are gone from its flags; they belong to stelow check breadboard (and using one now fails as an unknown option).

Schema-derived parity tests. The helper enforces a copy of schemas/breadboard.json, and the tests generate one violation per rule FROM the schema, so a rule added there fails until the helper learns it. The walker plants violations in optional fields too, so a rule cannot pass by being absent from the fixture.
Advance-guard tests. A valid map advances, an erroring map is refused with the stage untouched, and a map with gaps advances with the findings printed — the three outcomes the two severities exist for.
The HTML affordance table carries Control, matching the markdown view.

The guard could not execute itself on a host. Hosts sync the helper as a 0644 file and spawn it with bash; the guard's self-invocation now does the same instead of relying on an executable bit. (Caught by the new guard test — it copies the helper the way the host does.)