SkillOpt/CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to SkillOpt are documented here. This project adheres to Semantic Versioning and the format is based on Keep a Changelog.

[Unreleased]

Added

• Handoff backend (--backend handoff) for SkillOpt-Sleep — runs the sleep cycle with no model subprocess or API key: the engine writes each pending model call to PROMPTS.md/pending.json (exit code 3) and the user's own agent session answers into answers/<id>.md; re-running the same command resumes statelessly from the answers (typically 3–6 rounds per night). Mined tasks are pinned per night so answering sessions cannot shift the task set. Ships a /skillopt-sleep-handoff Claude Code command that automates the loop with fresh-context subagents to protect the held-out gate (thanks @dimitarvdenev, #125).
• Generic OpenAI-compatible research backend for optimizer and target calls, with configurable base URL, API key, model, and timeout (thanks @nankingjing, #115).
• OpenAI-compatible SkillOpt-Sleep endpoint support for providers such as DeepSeek and self-hosted vLLM servers (thanks @Alphaxalchemy, #129; hardened in #138).
• End-to-end wiring for the documented reflection --preferences option (thanks @AKhozya, #131).

Changed

• Claude Code's Sleep plugin can now use a pip/uv-installed skillopt-sleep when no repository checkout is present (thanks @ichoosetoaccept, #107).
• Qwen reasoning-model requests now use max_completion_tokens and omit unsupported temperature parameters (thanks @chirag127, #128).
• Configuration files are read explicitly as UTF-8 (thanks @nankingjing, #124).

Fixed

• Preserve fractional rollout hard scores instead of coercing them to binary values (thanks @zixuanguo786-ctrl, #104).
• Reject duplicate and overlapping IDs while materializing SearchQA manifests (thanks @zixuanguo786-ctrl, #105).
• Make JSON-array extraction robust to unmatched braces and keep malformed scans linear-time (thanks @zixuanguo786-ctrl, #103; follow-up #136).
• Package Markdown prompt assets in wheels and tolerate Windows temporary-file cleanup failures (thanks @nankingjing, #135; follow-up #137).
• Exclude sub-agent transcripts and plugin-generated sessions from Sleep task mining (thanks @codeL1985, #99).
• Normalize validation-gate density against the proposed edits and handle zero-edit candidates safely (thanks @SparshGarg999, #102).
• Route optimizer-role MiniMax calls through the MiniMax backend (thanks @jcforever1, #116).
• Surface Claude CLI spawn failures instead of silently turning them into zero scores (thanks @Phoenix0531-sudo, #126).
• Improve Claude CLI behavior on Windows, including .cmd resolution and long-prompt handling (thanks @codeL1985, #98).
• Preserve the scheduler's established annealing contract while expanding its endpoint and sequence coverage (thanks @nankingjing, #123; follow-up #133).

Security

• Prevent managed-identity credentials from being sent to non-Azure or non-HTTPS endpoints, and isolate compatible-provider request extensions from native Azure mode in SkillOpt-Sleep (#138, following @Alphaxalchemy's #129).

Tests

• Strengthen SkillOpt-Sleep verifier-discipline assertions, including recorded scores and gate actions (thanks @Tanmay9223, #96).
• Add focused coverage for the validation-gate decision core and edit-budget schedulers (thanks @nankingjing, #122, #123).

Acknowledgements 🙏

Thank you to the contributors behind this unreleased work: @AKhozya, @Alphaxalchemy, @Phoenix0531-sudo, @SparshGarg999, @Tanmay9223, @chirag127, @codeL1985, @dimitarvdenev, @ichoosetoaccept, @jcforever1, @nankingjing, and @zixuanguo786-ctrl.

0.2.0 — 2026-07-02

The headline of this release is SkillOpt-Sleep: a nightly offline self-evolution engine that harvests a coding agent's real session transcripts, mines recurring tasks, replays them offline, and consolidates short-term experience into long-term memory and skills — all behind the same held-out validation gate that keeps SkillOpt training honest. It ships as a decoupled top-level package (skillopt_sleep/, zero dependency on the research code) and as the new skillopt-sleep CLI.

Added

• SkillOpt-Sleep engine — nightly offline self-evolution cycle (harvest → mine → replay → consolidate) behind a validation gate, exposed as the skillopt-sleep console script and python -m skillopt_sleep.
  • Multi-objective reward (accuracy / tokens / latency) with user preferences.
  • Multi-rollout contrastive reflection under a token/time budget.
  • Experience replay + controllable dream rollouts (opt-in).
  • Slow-update long-term memory field (runs even with the gate off).
  • 3-way train/val/test split with gate_mode on|off.
  • Verifier-discipline validation gate, with a stress-test suite (thanks @Tanmay9223, #87).
• Cross-tool backends & plugin shells for Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Devin, and OpenClaw:
  • Codex Desktop transcript harvesting, skill-first Codex integration, and a reviewed task-file flow (thanks @Kirchberg, #48, #49, #60).
  • GitHub Copilot backend (CopilotCliBackend) + research-engine MCP plugin (thanks @Dongbumlee, #50).
  • Devin plugin: MCP server + ATIF-v1.7 harvest (thanks @xerxes-y, #88).
  • OpenClaw shell for SkillOpt-Sleep (thanks @Elzlxx, #59).
• SearchQA split materialization helper and fail-fast on systemic rollout failures, with a searchqa install extra (thanks @summerview1997, #63, #64, #65).
• WebUI environment loading and backend preflight (thanks @summerview1997, #63).

Changed

• Decoupled the Sleep engine into a standalone top-level skillopt_sleep/ package with zero dependency on the research code.
• Made EnvAdapter.reflect a shared default so reflect kwargs are no longer dropped (thanks @imshunsuke, #44).
• English-only pass across the engine, plugins, and docs.

Fixed

• Windows robustness for the Claude/Codex backends, plus a hardened JSON fallback path (thanks @Yif-Yang, #79).
• Reject prose pseudo-JSON wrapped in single quotes/backticks (#82).
• Surface Codex auth/model/version failures instead of silently scoring 0 (thanks @dmmdea, #92).
• Redact secrets before persisting cycle diagnostics.
• Configure the qwen_chat/minimax backends so local LLM endpoints work (thanks @imrehg, #85).
• Forward the Qwen target timeout and gate enable_thinking for vLLM targets (thanks @mvanhorn, #40).
• Make --bare conditional on ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (#68), add a SKILLOPT_SLEEP_PYTHON override with a lookback-hours first-run fallback (#74), and fix ALFWorld gamefile paths relative to ALFWORLD_DATA.

Packaging

• Bump skillopt, skillopt.__version__, and skillopt_sleep.__version__ to 0.2.0.
• Restore skillopt_webui to the built wheel (it was dropped when the packages.find include list was made explicit).
• Add the searchqa extra and include json_repair in the claude, qwen, and all extras.

Acknowledgements 🙏

v0.2.0 landed thanks to our community contributors — thank you!

• @Kirchberg — Codex Desktop harvesting, skill-first Codex integration, reviewed task-file flow (#48, #49, #60)
• @Dongbumlee — GitHub Copilot backend + research-engine MCP plugin (#50)
• @summerview1997 — SearchQA materialization, rollout fail-fast, WebUI preflight (#63, #64, #65)
• @xerxes-y — Devin plugin: MCP server + ATIF-v1.7 harvest (#88)
• @Elzlxx — OpenClaw shell for SkillOpt-Sleep (#59)
• @imshunsuke — shared EnvAdapter.reflect default + docs fixes (#43, #44)
• @mvanhorn — Qwen timeout forwarding + enable_thinking gating (#40)
• @dmmdea — surface Codex auth/model/version failures (#92)
• @Tanmay9223 — verifier-discipline stress test (#87)
• @imrehg — configure_qwen_chat for local LLM endpoints (#85)
• @samuelgoofus-boop — community contributions

Special thanks to @Yif-Yang for driving the SkillOpt-Sleep engine.

Full changelog: https://github.com/microsoft/SkillOpt/compare/v0.1.0...v0.2.0

0.1.0 — 2026-06-02

Initial public release: the full training loop (rollout → reflect → aggregate → select → update → evaluate), multi-backend support (OpenAI / Azure / Claude / Qwen / MiniMax), six built-in benchmarks, and the WebUI dashboard.