hive/docs/releases/v0.10.4.md

🐝 Hive Agent v0.10.4: Skill & Tool Library

Skills and tools move from something the framework hands down into something you curate. Every queen and every colony now has a dedicated allowlist and a UI to manage it, and the system prompt gets smaller and cache-friendlier along the way.

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✨ Highlights

v0.10.4 turns skills and tools into first-class, user-editable surfaces.

Before this release, the skill and tool catalogs were effectively framework defaults: whatever a queen could reach, every queen could reach. Now each queen has her own tool allowlist, her own skills, and a pair of library pages where you can browse, enable, disable, upload, and author them. Colonies inherit their founding queen's configuration at creation time and then drift on their own — flip a tool off for a colony without touching the queen, or the other way around.

A quiet but important second theme: the system prompt is now static across a session. Date and time — the main source of per-turn churn — are now injected at turn time instead of baked into the prompt. That keeps the prompt prefix stable so provider-side prompt caching can do its job.

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🆕 What's New

Skill Library

• Skill Library page — browse every skill by scope (queen / colony / framework preset), view SKILL.md inline, toggle per-scope enablement, upload skills as .md or .zip, and author new skills from the UI.
• Per-scope overrides — skill enablement is recorded in ~/.hive/agents/queens/{queen_id}/skills_overrides.json and ~/.hive/colonies/{colony_name}/skills_overrides.json; framework presets stay read-only, user-authored skills live under each scope's own skills directory.
• Skill provenance — the API and UI now distinguish framework-preset skills, queen-authored skills, and colony-authored skills, so you can tell at a glance who owns a given skill.
• Skill authoring primitives — a shared framework.skills.authoring module validates names, parses frontmatter, and materializes skill folders for the UI upload path, the create_colony tool's inline skills, and future runtime-learned skills.
• Preset rename — built-in skills moved from _default_skills/ to _preset_skills/ to match the new "preset vs. user" split. Existing browser/linkedin/x automation skills carry over untouched.

Tool Library

• Tool Library page with a shared ToolsEditor component used by the queen profile and colony settings panels.
• Per-queen tool allowlist at ~/.hive/agents/queens/{queen_id}/tools.json: null = allow all, [] = disable all, ["foo", "bar"] = only these MCP tools pass the filter.
• Per-colony tool allowlist at ~/.hive/colonies/{colony_name}/tools.json, with the same schema, atomic writes, and independent lifecycle.
• Configurable defaults — queens now carry a default tool/skill bundle that seeds each new colony, and the bundle itself is editable.
• Colony inheritance — when a queen spawns a colony, the colony starts from the queen's tool and skill configuration. After spawn the two diverge freely.
• Colony sidecar — tools.json lives next to metadata.json so identity/provenance (queen, created_at, workers) and tool gating evolve independently.

MCP Server Management

• MCP Servers panel — dedicated settings UI for browsing, configuring, and enabling bundled and user MCP servers.
• /api/mcp routes for listing built-in servers, inspecting state, and reporting errors with structured MCP error responses.
• Tool catalog wiring — live queen sessions now surface their MCP tool catalog to the queen-tools and colony-tools endpoints, so the UI shows exactly what the running session can see.

Prompt & Runtime

• Static system prompt — the agent loop, conversation, and provider adapters (LiteLLM, Antigravity, Codex, Mock) now build and freeze the system prompt once per session. Per-turn values that used to churn the prompt are gone.
• Date/time injected at turn time — today's date and current time move from the system prompt into a turn-level injection path that updates cursor persistence and queen-lifecycle tooling.
• Queen orchestrator — refreshed to pair with the static prompt model and the new tool/skill configuration layers.
• Session manager — tightened session-creation input validation and reflection/skill edge handling; "create new session and switch branch" is now reliable.

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🐛 Bug Fixes

• No-cache middleware on /api/* — every API response now carries Cache-Control: no-store. Without this, a one-off bad response (e.g. the SPA catch-all leaking index.html for an /api/* URL before a route was registered) could get pinned in the browser's disk cache and replayed forever, since our JSON handlers don't emit ETag/Last-Modified. Hard-refresh no longer required to recover.
• Tools & skills registration — queens and colonies no longer end up with stale or duplicated entries after reloads.
• Session creation — invalid inputs are rejected up front with clear errors instead of surfacing later as runtime failures.
• Skill / reflection edges — tightened handling so reflection runs no longer see half-built skill state during scope reloads.
• Create new session + switch branch flow works end-to-end without orphaning sessions.
• CI — broken workflow repaired.

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🧪 Tests

• test_routes_skills.py, test_skill_overrides.py, test_colony_tools.py, test_queen_tools.py, test_mcp_routes.py — coverage added for every new route group and the override store.

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🚀 Upgrading from v0.10.3

No migration. Pull main at v0.10.4 and restart Hive — existing ~/.hive/ profiles, queens, colonies, and sessions keep working.

Two things to know:

1. Preset skills directory renamed from _default_skills/ to _preset_skills/ inside the framework. If you had external scripts pointing at that path, update them. User-authored skills under ~/.hive/ are unaffected.
2. First open of a queen or colony writes a tools.json sidecar the first time you edit its allowlist. If you don't touch the Tool Library, nothing is written and behavior matches v0.10.3 (allow all MCP tools).

Curate your queens. 🐝