Changelog

What's new in gest — told version by version.

v0.5.0

v0.5.0 is the storage rewrite. Entity data moves from flat TOML/Markdown files under .gest/ into a single SQLite database (via libsql), and project identity becomes explicit so multiple worktrees of the same repo can share a live view of the same tasks, artifacts, and iterations. Existing v0.4.x projects import in one shot — see the v0.4 → v0.5 migration guide for the full upgrade path, data mapping, and rollback procedure.

SQLite-First Storage

Entity data now lives in <data_dir>/gest.db — a single libsql database that holds tasks, artifacts, iterations, notes, relationships, tags, events, and undo history in one place. Multi-entity writes are atomic (so a task plus its tags plus its relationships land together or not at all), and concurrent agents can hit the same store without fighting over flat-file locks.

For local-mode projects, .gest/ sticks around as a sync mirror: the database is the source of truth, but every mutation rewrites a set of human-readable YAML/Markdown files under .gest/task/, .gest/artifact/, and .gest/iteration/ (singular subdirectories, a small rename from the v0.4.x plural layout) so the data stays inspectable and git-committable. Disable the mirror with storage.sync = false or GEST_STORAGE__SYNC=false if you want the database only.

A new [database] config section lets you point gest at a remote libsql/Turso instance. Set url directly, or provide scheme, host, port, username, password, and auth_token individually:

[database]
url = "libsql://my-project.turso.io"
auth_token = "..."

Existing v0.4.x projects are imported with gest migrate --from v0.4. The migrator auto-discovers both the local-mode .gest/ layout and the global-mode ~/.local/share/gest/<hash>/ layout, preserves every ID so external references (commit messages, PR bodies) keep working, and prints a summary of what it imported. The guide walks through the details.

Workspaces

In v0.4.x, two worktrees of the same repo produced two entirely separate stores: local mode wrote to the worktree's own .gest/, and global mode keyed the project row by hashing the current working directory, so each checkout got a different hash. Parallel agents couldn't share a project.

v0.5.0 makes project identity explicit. A project is a row in the database, identified by an assigned ID. Additional checkouts opt in by attaching as a workspace:

# In the original checkout, find the project ID
gest project

# In a second worktree, attach to it
cd ../myapp-feature-a
gest project attach <project-id>

After attaching, both checkouts resolve to the same project row and share the same tasks, artifacts, and iterations in real time. gest project detach reverses the operation, and gest project list shows all known projects across your machine.

Artifact Notes

Artifacts now support the same note management surface as tasks. Use gest artifact note add, list, show, update, and delete to attach human- or agent-authored annotations to a spec, ADR, or RFC over time. Notes appear in artifact show output and on the web UI artifact detail page, with the same Gravatar avatars and agent badges you already get on task notes.

Entity Deletion

Tasks and artifacts can now be hard-deleted from the store. gest task delete <id> and gest artifact delete <id> remove the entity and all its dependent rows (notes, relationships, tags, events). Both commands prompt for confirmation interactively; pass --yes to skip the prompt in scripts. task delete additionally requires --force when the task is still a member of one or more iterations — this keeps active sprint members from being removed by accident.

Destructive note commands (task note delete, artifact note delete) now prompt by default as well, with the same --yes escape hatch.

Theme Overhaul

The theme system has been rebuilt around a new token hierarchy and richer palette semantics, and the default palette has been retuned across the CLI and web UI. Rather than inlining the full token list here, see the theming reference for the complete set of tokens, the palette slots they cascade from, and examples for overriding them in your gest.toml.

New Flags and Ergonomics

• gest task claim <id> assigns the task to the current author and marks it in-progress in a single step — handy when picking up the next available task from an iteration
• --raw (-r) output flag on entity commands produces script-friendly plain output without themed styling, giving you a third output mode alongside the default human-readable and --json shapes
• --limit <N> on task list, iteration list, artifact list, and gest search caps result counts for faster scanning of large projects
• --metadata-json on create and update commands merges a JSON object into metadata on top of any --metadata key=value pairs, so you can set structured values in one shot without repeated -m flags
• gest artifact create gained -i/--iteration (link a new artifact to an iteration inline) and -s/--source (read the body from a file path instead of stdin or $EDITOR)
• gest config get storage.data_dir returns the resolved path instead of null when no explicit override is set

Breaking Changes

• Storage format changed to SQLite. Existing v0.4.x projects must be imported with gest migrate --from v0.4. The migrator never touches the source files, so your old .gest/ stays intact as a backup until you remove it yourself. Follow the migration guide for details.
• Artifact kind field removed. Categorization is tag-driven now. The migrator converts kind: "spec" into a spec tag automatically.
• artifact create CLI reshaped. The command takes a positional [TITLE] argument; the --title and --type flags are gone, and -t is now a shortcut for --tag instead of --type.
• type: search filter removed. Use tag:<name> instead (e.g. gest search 'tag:spec'). If you had type: queries in personal aliases or scripts, update them.
• Environment variables renamed or removed. GEST_LOG_LEVEL is now GEST_LOG__LEVEL (double underscore). GEST_DATA_DIR is now GEST_STORAGE__DATA_DIR. GEST_PROJECT_DIR, GEST_STATE_DIR, GEST_ARTIFACT_DIR, GEST_TASK_DIR, and GEST_ITERATION_DIR are all gone — the new storage model has no per-entity directory overrides.
• Config fields removed. storage.project_dir, storage.state_dir, storage.artifact_dir, storage.task_dir, and storage.iteration_dir are no longer honored; delete them from existing gest.toml files.
• Undo state lives in the database. There is no longer a separate state directory; undo history follows whichever database the command ran against.

v0.4.4

2026-04-04

Security Headers

The web server now sets Content-Security-Policy, X-Frame-Options, and X-Content-Type-Options on every response, hardening the default setup against clickjacking and content-type sniffing.

Bug Fixes

• The -q flag on mutation commands was printing the full 32-character ID — it now outputs the 8-character short ID, matching how IDs are displayed everywhere else
• Store writes use the tempfile crate for proper temporary files, avoiding collisions when multiple agents write concurrently
• config get storage.project_dir now returns the resolved path instead of null when no explicit override is set (#31)

Performance

Iteration orchestration operations (all_phases, assignees, phases_with_incomplete) now use sort+dedup instead of HashSet round-trips, and an unnecessary double-clone has been eliminated.

v0.4.3

2026-04-03

Iteration Cancel and Reopen

Iterations can now be cancelled and reopened with dedicated commands. gest iteration cancel <id> marks the iteration as cancelled and automatically cascades to all non-terminal tasks — open and in-progress tasks become cancelled, while done tasks are left untouched. gest iteration reopen <id> reverses the operation, restoring the iteration and its cancelled tasks. The old failed status remains as a deprecated alias for backward compatibility.

Live Reload

The web UI now updates in real time. When you change project files on disk, pages connected to the web server receive updates via server-sent events and swap in fresh content without a full reload. The file watcher debounce defaults to 2000ms and is configurable via serve.debounce_ms.

Request Logging

Every HTTP request to the web server is now logged with method, path, response status, and elapsed time. Control the verbosity with the serve.log_level setting (default: info).

Web Dashboard

The dashboard task card now shows only actionable work (open + in-progress) rather than all tasks. A new iteration status breakdown row shows active, completed, and cancelled counts with links to filtered views.

Bug Fixes

• read_from_editor no longer drops content due to a missing return statement

v0.4.2

2026-04-02

Ergonomics Everywhere

This release is all about reducing friction. Nearly every common workflow got shorter.

Command aliases let you move faster: gest t instead of gest task, gest a for gest artifact, gest i for gest iteration, gest grep for gest search. Subcommands gained natural aliases too — new, ls, view, edit, and rm all work where you'd expect. Top-level u and s shortcuts round out undo and serve.

Lifecycle shortcuts — task complete, task cancel, and task block — handle the most common status transitions in a single command instead of task update --status.

Tags got simpler. A unified --tag flag works on both create and update commands, and tag/untag commands accept comma-separated values (gest task tag <id> rust,cli) so you can apply multiple tags in one shot.

Machine-Readable Output

Every mutation command now accepts --json for structured output and -q for bare IDs — making gest a first-class citizen in shell pipelines and automation scripts. meta get gained --json and --raw variants for programmatic value access.

Batch and Pipeline Support

The new --batch flag reads NDJSON from stdin to create multiple tasks or artifacts in a single invocation. Body and description fields can also be piped from stdin implicitly, so echo "notes" | gest task create "my task" just works.

Create commands gained -i/--iteration to add the new entity to an iteration inline, and task create supports -l/--link for creating relationships at creation time — no follow-up commands needed.

Search Paging

Search output is now paged through $PAGER (falling back to less -R) when stdout is a terminal. Piped and redirected output bypasses the pager automatically.

Under the Hood

Entity operations are now backed by generic trait-based action functions, and catch-all error variants have been replaced with domain-specific types that produce clearer diagnostics. Tag list tables now render with proper theme formatting.

v0.4.1

2026-04-01

Search Filters

gest search now understands structured queries. Use is:, tag:, status:, and type: prefixes to narrow results — negate any filter with a - prefix (e.g. -status:done). Filters of the same type OR-combine, and different filter types AND-combine, giving you precise control without complex syntax.

Reliability and Safety

A batch of fixes hardens the store and web server:

• Entity file moves are now atomic (write-to-temp then rename), closing a TOCTOU race that could leave partial files on disk
• Unrecognized event types produce a clear error instead of panicking
• HTML error responses are sanitized to prevent reflected XSS
• Dashboard errors are logged instead of silently swallowed
• Task link mutations use a dedicated patch field for atomicity
• CLI metadata values are parsed as typed TOML (numbers, booleans) rather than always strings
• Native TOML datetimes are deserialized correctly
• Integer casts in orchestration replaced with correct types
• UI text truncation no longer panics on edge-case inputs

v0.4.0

2026-04-01

Undo

You can now reverse the most recent mutating command with gest undo. Under the hood, a new SQLite-backed event store captures before/after snapshots of every file mutation. If something goes wrong, gest undo restores the previous state in one step. The event store location is configurable via GEST_STATE_DIR or storage.state_dir.

Tags

New gest tag add|remove|list subcommands let you manage tags on any entity. gest tags lists all tags across the project with optional entity-type filtering. Tags are a lightweight way to categorize and find related work.

Activity Timeline

Task and iteration status, phase, and priority changes are now recorded automatically as events with author attribution. The show views merge events and notes into a single chronological activity timeline — in both the CLI and the web UI — so you can see the full history of an entity at a glance.

Theming Overhaul

Color configuration has been restructured into two tiers: [colors.palette] defines 11 semantic color slots, and [colors.overrides] provides per-token customization. Palette colors cascade through to all tokens that reference a given slot, making it easy to restyle the entire UI by changing a few palette values. config show now displays palette and override counts separately.

Web UI Accessibility

The web UI received a comprehensive accessibility pass to meet WCAG 2.1 AA requirements:

• Semantic HTML landmarks and a skip-to-content link for screen readers
• Heading hierarchy with proper h1–h6 elements
• Font sizes converted to rem units respecting browser preferences
• Color contrast updated to meet the 4.5:1 minimum ratio
• Focus-visible outlines on all interactive elements for keyboard navigation
• ARIA labels on form fields and the relationship modal
• Keyboard-accessible relationship modal with focus trap and Escape-to-close

Cross-Entity IDs

ID generation now checks for prefix collisions across all entity types before assigning a short ID, and a new cross-entity resolver can look up any entity by prefix with ambiguity detection. The --no-color global flag is also available for scripting.

Breaking Changes

This release bundles several breaking changes:

• GEST_DATA_DIR semantics changed. It now points to the global root (e.g. ~/.local/share/gest) instead of the project-specific directory. Use the new GEST_PROJECT_DIR env var or storage.project_dir config field for the old behavior.
• Color config restructured. The flat [colors] section is replaced by [colors.palette] and [colors.overrides].
• Project discovery tightened. Only .gest/ directories are matched during walk-up discovery; unrelated directories named gest/ are no longer false positives.
• Empty datetime fields omitted. Task and iteration TOML files no longer write resolved_at = "" or completed_at = "". Existing files with empty strings are still read correctly.

Bug Fixes

• config set now writes typed TOML values instead of wrapping everything as strings
• Event recording no longer silently skipped when git user.name is unset

v0.3.5

2026-03-31

Task Notes

Tasks can now carry threaded notes with author attribution. Human authors are identified automatically from your git config, and agent-authored notes are tagged with --agent. Each note includes a timestamp and renders its body as markdown.

• Add, list, show, update, and delete notes via gest task note subcommands
• Notes appear in task show output and on the web UI task detail page
• Gravatar avatars and agent badges distinguish human from machine authors

Iteration Orchestration

New commands make it easier to drive multi-phase work through an iteration without manually juggling task status.

• iteration status shows progress at a glance
• iteration next peeks at or claims the next available task
• iteration advance signals that a phase is complete

Filtering and Search

• task list --assigned-to narrows results by assignee
• iteration list --has-available finds iterations with claimable work
• gest search now includes iterations in its results

v0.3.4

2026-03-31

Security

ID prefix validation now rejects invalid characters, closing a potential path injection vector via crafted entity IDs.

v0.3.3

2026-03-31

Web UI Forms

The web UI gained create and edit forms for tasks and artifacts, complete with markdown preview, relationship management, and inline search — so you can manage your project without leaving the browser.

• Dashboard status cards now link directly to filtered task views
• New/edit buttons on list and detail pages for quick navigation

Display Improvements

Short ID prefixes are now clickable links throughout the web UI. Tags are clickable for quick filtering, and artifact type labels are used consistently across all views.

Bug Fixes

• Store writes now respect whether an entity lives in the active or archive/resolved directory, preventing duplicates on mutation
• CLI flags (--version, --verbose) and shell completion variants now include help text (#24)

v0.3.2

2026-03-31

Built-in Web Server

gest serve launches a local web UI with a dashboard, task/artifact/iteration views, a kanban board, and full-text search — everything you need to browse your project visually (#13–#23).

• --port, --bind, and --no-open flags control the local server (#15)
• [serve] config section with port, bind_address, and open settings (#14)

Performance

• Iteration phase counts are now cached instead of recomputed on every read
• resolve_dot_path walks by reference instead of cloning, reducing allocations
• Shared helpers consolidated across store operations, CLI metadata handling, and tag/untag commands

Bug Fixes

• Multi-word EDITOR values (e.g. code --wait) are now parsed correctly via shell tokenization
• Nested metadata set_nested is bounds-checked with a depth limit to prevent stack overflows
• Version line no longer appears in the --help banner
• gest search --expand now shows full content instead of truncated snippets (#11)

v0.3.1

2026-03-30

Per-Entity Directory Overrides

You can now control where each entity type is stored on disk via GEST_ARTIFACT_DIR, GEST_TASK_DIR, and GEST_ITERATION_DIR environment variables — or the corresponding storage.*_dir config fields.

Performance

• Blocked-by status resolution for task lists now uses a single batched read pass instead of per-task I/O
• Search filtering avoids redundant string allocations during case-insensitive matching
• Prefix matching exits early after two matches instead of collecting all candidates
• Metadata serialization is skipped during search when maps are empty
• Store functions receive the full application config, removing the need for plumbing changes when new settings are accessed

v0.3.0

2026-03-30

Breaking Changes

This release includes two breaking changes:

• TOML-only configuration. JSON and YAML config files are no longer supported. Rename your config to gest.toml and convert the contents to TOML.
• Global store by default. gest init now creates the global data store. Use gest init --local if you want an in-repo .gest/ directory.

New UI

The entire terminal UI has been rebuilt with an atomic architecture (atoms, composites, views) for consistent, aligned rendering across all commands.

v0.2.3

2026-03-29

Iterations

A new entity type for planning multi-phase work. Iterations have their own storage, UI components, CLI commands, and a graph visualization that shows how tasks flow through phases.

Richer Task Fields

Tasks now support priority, assigned_to, and phase fields for more structured project tracking.

Search Improvements

--expand on gest search now works without --json, showing full detail blocks directly in the terminal.

v0.2.2

2026-03-27

Update Notifications

gest version now checks for newer releases and suggests gest self-update when one is available.

Search Improvements

The --expand (-e) flag on gest search enriches --json output with full item details.

Theme Tokens

New indicator.blocked and indicator.blocking theme tokens let you customize how task list status indicators look.

Performance

Reduced unnecessary memory allocations in UI rendering and search, plus extracted shared helpers and removed dead code.

v0.2.1

2026-03-26

Bug Fixes

• Install script now downloads the correct checksum file during installation
• Self-update no longer fails with a 404 when fetching the target release

v0.2.0

2026-03-26

Shell Completions and Man Pages

New generation commands produce shell completions and man pages for your preferred shell (#1).

Markdown Rendering

Descriptions are no longer plain text in the terminal. Headings, code blocks, lists, blockquotes, and more are rendered with styled formatting (#2, #3). Artifact and task detail views use this automatically (#4, #5).

Verbose Logging

Every command, store operation, and config discovery step now emits verbose logs for easier debugging.

Breaking Change

artifact list --include-archived has been renamed to --all (-a), matching the convention used by task and search commands.

Performance

Faster unique ID prefix computation and shorter ID encoding.

Bug Fixes

Log level semantics now correctly follow the debug=why, trace=result convention.

v0.1.0

2026-03-26

The first release of gest — a lightweight CLI for tracking AI-agent-generated tasks and artifacts alongside your project. Ships with artifact and task commands, TOML/JSON/YAML configuration, search, and editor integration.