# Talking Stick 0.8.0

Date: 2026-06-18

Coordination guidance hardening driven by mining real Claude and Codex session logs (134 sessions across both harness stores). Both corpora independently ranked the same root problem — agents distrusting the single long-poll — and surfaced the same meta-insight: the rules mostly already existed but were buried in prose.

## Added
- **Coordination Quick Reference in the skill.** A short, mechanical checklist at the top of the `talking-stick` skill front-loads the highest-leverage rules: one `tt wait --events --after <cursor>` loop as the only poll *and* the only listener, never bare `tt wait`, advance the returned `cursor_event_seq` and re-arm exactly one loop, bound `tt events`, no shared mutation without a fresh `your_turn` and a live `guardian_pid`, and test before the final handoff.
- **Coordination is mandatory and testing-before-final-handoff are now explicit** in both the bundled skill and the editable collaboration instructions, plus a "lead a multi-agent kickoff with one room broadcast of the goal and a proposed split" optimization.
- **`LICENSE.md` (MIT) added** and both `LICENSE.md` and `CHANGELOG.md` now ship in the published package `files`.

## Changed
- **Corrected owner-side receive-path guidance.** An owner's `tt wait --events` is a genuine long-poll: `isTurnWake` suppresses `already_owner` as a turn wake, so the loop blocks until an event arrives or the wait times out, then returns `your_turn` with `reason: "already_owner"`. The same single loop now serves owner and waiter alike and doubles as guardian keepalive. This replaces prior owner-side `tt events --follow` listener advice — a recurring leaked-duplicate-listener footgun seen in the logs; the only documented fallback for harnesses that cannot run `tt wait` is now a single one-shot `tt events --wait`.
- **Never bare `tt wait`.** The skill, instructions, and README now require the standby loop to always be `tt wait --events --after <cursor>`; bare `tt wait` wakes only on a turn change and silently misses messages and events.
- **Bound `tt events`.** Guidance to always pass `--after` (and `--limit`); a bare `tt events --target any` can dump the entire log (tens of thousands of tokens).

## Verification

```bash
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build
node dist/cli.js --help
git diff --check
npm pack --dry-run
```