Changelog

Verify merges on its own terms

Previously, if CI was red on the base branch, Boss would refuse to merge a pull request even when the PR itself had passed all checks. Boss now judges a PR’s merge readiness by the CI runs that belong to that PR, not by whatever is happening on the base branch at the time. A flaky or broken main branch no longer blocks your work from landing.

Related: Boss also had a bug where it would count CI runs from release-PR merges against the base branch check, which caused nearly every merge attempt to be blocked. That is fixed.

Features

• Verify now shows what it is waiting for. When a verify session is armed and waiting, the session list now tells you what condition it is holding for instead of looking idle.
• Running Boss as a service is now safer. If you have Boss installed as a system service, boss daemon start will refuse to launch a second, detached copy that could conflict with it. If the service is already running, Boss will connect to it instead.

Improvements

• Secrets passed to a session are now delivered to terminal panes in a way that keeps them out of the process list. Previously they could be read by anyone who ran ps on the same machine.
• Agent worktrees now inherit only an explicit, allowed set of secrets from your checkout’s .env file, keeping unrelated or tool-redirecting keys out of the agent environment.
• When a build completes, Boss now posts the build receipt before moving the associated ticket to “In Review,” so the receipt is visible as soon as the status changes.
• Project config export and apply now compare gate commands by what they actually execute, so a gate expressed differently but running the same command is correctly recognized as unchanged. The “ungated” warning on adopted crons is also fixed.
• Fixed an issue where sessions that produced no output could get incorrectly pushed into the pull request pipeline by the repair process.
• Fixed an issue where a session that produced no output would sometimes not close itself cleanly, leaving stray sessions behind.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where CI runs associated with release-PR merges were being counted against the base branch check, blocking merges that should have gone through.
• Fixed an issue where zero-output sessions were not ending themselves and left orphaned entries that could be picked up incorrectly at startup.

Webhooks and triggers get a lot more control

You can now choose the exact format Boss uses when it sends a webhook after a session. Built-in formats let you shape the payload to match what your receiving service expects, with a Slack-style example to get started. You can preview the rendered body right in the webhook form so you know exactly what will be sent.

Triggers picked up two new options as well. You can set a setup command that runs before each triggered session starts, and you can tell Boss to suppress output for unattended runs. Both options are available in the web app, the CLI, and the API.

Trigger gates also now support a script path in the API and CLI, giving you more control over what logic Boss uses to decide whether a trigger should fire.

Features

• Project config export and apply. You can now export your Boss setup to a .boss-project.json file with boss project export, compare it against your live configuration with boss project diff, and push changes back with boss project apply. This works for crons, triggers, and webhooks, including across multiple daemons. The same tools are available as MCP tools for agent-driven workflows.
• Verification evidence on pull requests. Boss can now record video and structured evidence during a verification run and attach it directly to the pull request as a comment. A new security-focused verification check also scans for risky patterns in changed code.
• Organizations guide. The docs now include a guide covering organization membership and how to manage it from the web app.

Improvements

• Configuration errors now tell you which settings file the problem came from, making it easier to track down a bad value.
• Cron jobs managed through project config are now clearly marked as such, so you can tell at a glance which jobs are under config control.
• Long initial prompts are now delivered to agent sessions via a file rather than being pasted directly, which avoids failures caused by prompts that exceed paste size limits. Boss also waits for confirmation that the prompt was received before declaring the session started, so a session can no longer silently drop its first message.
• Fixed an issue where sending a message to Claude could fail if the terminal showed a collapsed-paste placeholder before Boss had finished composing the input.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the weekly retro could stall or silently skip work if the notes store had a read error.
• Fixed an issue where updating Boss internals could fail if there were untracked files in the working directory.
• Fixed an issue where a misconfigured settings file would report a JSON parse error without saying which file was affected.
• Fixed an issue where a gate timeout could be submitted without a required script path, causing it to be silently ignored.

Triggers and Webhooks

Boss now has first-class support for triggers and webhooks, two features that let you connect Bossanova to the rest of your workflow.

Triggers let Boss start a session automatically when something happens in GitHub, such as a pull request being opened or checks passing. You can manage triggers from the new Triggers section in Settings, from the boss trigger CLI commands, or through MCP tools. Each trigger can be configured with a filter (for example, a specific repository or event type), a concurrency policy (including cancelling a running session when a new event arrives), and a secret for verifying incoming requests.

Webhooks let Bossanova notify an external URL when a session completes. The new Webhooks section in Settings shows all your endpoints, lets you rotate signing secrets, send a test event, and browse delivery history to confirm payloads are arriving. The same functionality is available from the boss webhook CLI commands and MCP tools.

Features

• Organization notes. Boss can now store and retrieve notes scoped to your organization, separate from individual sessions. Notes sync across your agents and are browsable in the new Notes section in Settings, filterable by tag, repository, or source. You can also read and write organization notes through the boss notes org commands and MCP tools.
• Software Factory guide. The docs site now has a full Software Factory page that walks through the automated coding workflow, the skills Boss uses at each stage, and the gates that control progression.
• Triggers support a cancel-in-progress concurrency option, matching the behavior already available for cron jobs. When a new event fires while a session is running, Boss cancels the existing session before starting the new one.
• You can now send a test event to a webhook endpoint and view its delivery history directly from the Settings page.
• boss init now walks you through setup interactively when run in a terminal, showing a summary and factory documentation at the end.

Improvements

• The Accounts page in Settings has been tidied up, with add and edit forms moved to their own pages.
• Settings navigation is now sorted and each section links to its relevant documentation.
• Dates are formatted consistently as YYYY-MM-DD throughout the app.
• Only repositories connected to your organization appear in the trigger setup form.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where webhook mutations in the Settings page could incorrectly share a single loading state across multiple rows.
• Fixed an issue where signing secrets would disappear before being acknowledged when managing webhooks.
• Fixed an issue where the trigger form could drop commas in single-value filter entries.
• Fixed an issue where the notes list could fall out of sync after a write completed.

Hermes Agent integration

Boss can now install directly into Hermes Agent. Running boss hermes install wires Boss’s tools into Hermes as a native plugin, so Hermes can use Boss’s full capabilities without any manual configuration. A setup guide is included.

Features

• Boss can now read GA4 traffic and conversion data, giving agents access to web analytics alongside other growth signals.
• Completed planning sessions now archive themselves automatically instead of leaving a session open after finishing.
• Boss build now supports opt-in completion hooks that run after a build finishes, useful for teams that want to trigger follow-up steps automatically.

Improvements

• Fixed an issue where code reviews would silently skip or produce incomplete results even though the coverage indicator showed full coverage. Review results now accurately reflect what was actually checked.
• Fixed an issue where planning would flag harmless formatting differences (like how Linear normalizes markdown punctuation, blank lines, and table rows) as meaningful changes to a plan. Boss now recognizes these as cosmetic and ignores them.
• Fixed an issue where post-rebase checks missed real conflicts, skipped files that needed regeneration, and failed to notice when tests added in the base branch were not carried forward.
• Fixed an issue where new sessions could be linked to the wrong ticket, create duplicate sessions, or set the wrong upstream branch.
• Fixed an issue where the web terminal would get stuck showing “Daemon offline” after a connection was interrupted. Teardown now completes cleanly.
• Fixed an issue where Boss would exhaust the GitHub API quota during background polling, which could cause failures for other operations that needed the API.
• Fixed an issue where transient Linear errors (including gateway errors and label save failures) were not retried correctly.
• Fixed an issue where the dependency scan in planning could produce misleading results for tickets with epic parents or files at the root of the repository.
• Running Boss with a custom settings file now correctly carries that setting through to background services, so the right configuration is used consistently.
• Unattended sessions now include enough context to identify themselves without extra lookups.

Improvements

• Fixed several issues where Boss’s automated CI checks could misread the state of a build, reporting a run as complete or passing when it was still queued, in progress, or not yet started. CI waits are now more accurate, and Boss is less likely to move forward on a stale or incorrect signal.
• Fixed an issue where Boss could incorrectly flag a skill as drifted when the installed version was actually newer than the one in the current source tree. Drift detection now reports the direction of the mismatch more clearly and no longer blocks runs that are simply ahead of the checked-out version.
• Fixed several issues in the boss callback and ci-watch command-line tools, including inconsistent flags, broken JSON output, and triggers that would re-fire unexpectedly. Cleanup commands now correctly account for all relevant states when removing callbacks.
• Fixed issues where the automated proof step could silently fail, misidentify which part of the product it was testing, or refuse to run in a freshly created worktree. Proof runs now report failures visibly and behave correctly in clean environments.
• Fixed an issue where analytics scripts were being blocked by the site’s content security policy, which could cause errors in the browser console for some visitors.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where an empty list of workflow runs could cause Boss to incorrectly skip a gate check it should have been waiting on.

Improvements

• Boss’s website and web properties now include analytics, which helps the team understand how people use and discover the product.

Built-in task tracking, ready out of the box

Boss now ships with built-in support for task tracking, including default states, labels, and tool access, so you no longer need to configure these manually to get started. Two workflow extensions, Compound Engineering and Notes, are also included by default. They were previously something you had to add yourself.

Improvements

• Boss waits for task-tracking tools to finish connecting before trying to use them, so you are less likely to hit errors when those tools are still starting up.
• Build checks no longer block on warnings or minor issues. Boss only holds things up when there is a genuine failure or a branch that cannot be pushed.

Run-now button shows progress while a cron job is running

When you trigger a cron job manually from the web interface, the Run-now button now shows a spinner while the job is in progress. Previously the button gave no feedback after you clicked it, leaving you to wonder whether anything had actually started.

Improvements

• When two tasks touch overlapping files, Boss now treats that as useful context rather than a reason to stall. Plans with file overlap continue moving forward instead of waiting for manual resolution.
• Boss’s internal skills for planning, building, reviewing, repairing, and finalizing work have been rewritten with clearer goals and guardrails. The practical effect is more consistent behavior across a session, fewer edge cases where Boss gets stuck, and a smaller chance of it taking an unexpected detour.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Boss could block progress when it encountered something it was able to handle on its own. It now resolves what it can and continues.

Repos registered over MCP now work reliably

When you added a repository to Boss using an MCP client, sessions could fail to start because Boss did not record where to put the working files. Boss now sets a sensible default for that location automatically, so sessions start as expected. You can also set or update the working directory for a repo from the command line using boss repo update --worktree-base-dir.

Improvements

• Boss is better at tracking how much Claude usage has actually been consumed, rather than relying on a coarser signal that could misread your account’s status and incorrectly show a cooldown.
• Planning is more reliable when a plan’s starting assumptions drift out of date. Boss now checks and reconciles those assumptions before saving each step, reducing cases where a plan would proceed on stale premises.
• Boss now distinguishes between files it is actively editing and files it is only reading for context. This makes the reported scope of a change more accurate.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where background Codex work could intercept keyboard shortcuts meant for your active chat session.
• Fixed an issue where error details from Linear were silently lost, making some Linear-related failures harder to diagnose.
• Fixed a deployment issue on macOS where a missing certificate bundle caused Boss to be blocked by Cloudflare when running certain internal tasks.

Plan drafting is faster and more reliable

Boss’s planning flow has been tightened up in several places. Dependency scanning between tasks now only blocks on genuine file-level overlaps instead of flagging false conflicts based on broad area matches, so plans come back with fewer unnecessary dependencies. Replanning, batch-tier handling, and the interactive drafting flow also behave more predictably when a plan needs to be revised mid-session.

Improvements

• Boss waits properly for in-progress work before moving to the next step, so subagent tasks are less likely to finalize before the work they depend on is actually done.
• CI polling during builds and repairs now stays within time limits and resumes correctly if interrupted, rather than stalling or losing track of where it left off.
• Notes sweeping and recording are more consistent: duplicate entries are filtered out, per-note expiry works correctly, and the pipeline makes cleaner decisions about which notes to keep or discard.
• Plan sweeping now applies the right scope when excluding items and handles terminal outcomes more completely.
• Merge conflicts in shared tracking files are less likely to come up during rebases; measurements and inventories are now generated from a single source rather than maintained by hand in multiple places.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the dependency scanner would block tasks on shared directories or area labels even when the tasks touched completely different files.
• Fixed an issue where stopping a running test gate was reported as a failure rather than a clean stop.
• Fixed an issue where the test cache could serve a stale result when files had been added or renamed, or when a run was explicitly forced uncached.
• Fixed an issue where checking repository cleanliness could produce incorrect results because a shell hook was rewriting the output of standard tools like git, diff, and grep.
• Fixed an issue where a push step in the finalize flow could appear to succeed even if the push itself had failed.
• Fixed an issue where restarting Boss could briefly show a false connection error.