7. The release

Monday, 14:47 UTC. You type aayu release 144 --to rolling and answer "yes" at the prompt. Somewhere in CI, a full test run starts on a commit that does not exist on any branch yet. If it fails, nothing moves.

Merged is not released

Shipping put your five stories on dev, where work integrates. Releasing puts them in front of people. aayudha moves work up a ladder of three branches: dev, then a rolling snapshot for early adopters, then a stable release on main (dev, rolling, main). Every step up runs a full gate first.

Back at 08:51, the agent had filed Release 144, listing the three Features it would carry. Now release checks that everything on that list has shipped. Then it builds the exact merge commit that will land, on a temporary branch, and runs the promotion gate on it in CI: the full test suite that must pass before a branch moves.

What happened at 14:47

• The candidate commit was 9991cd3, titled "Rolling snapshot: 20261012T1447Z".
• The skill evals (tests of the agents' own instructions, under the gates described in the epilogue) and the rolling gate both passed on the first attempt.
• rolling moved to that exact commit, tagged rolling-2026-10-12.4.
• Stories 132, 133, and 134 were stamped released. Stories 130 and 131 had already gone out in the 10:43 snapshot, rolling-2026-10-12.3.
• Release notes were written, naming only proven Features.
• The measurement of Goal 125 and Initiative 126 was scheduled for after 9 November 2026, 28 days out.

All of it was written back onto the Release issue as shipping evidence: the runs, the artifacts and their fingerprints, the stories, the notes, and the due dates. Because the example lives inside aayudha's own repository, that snapshot is also a release of aayudha itself: the very one your first hour installs.

Honest status: in the real run, the seeded measurement and the closing summary in the next two chapters were made just before this release, between 14:29 and 14:39. The real 28-day measurement comes after 9 November. And no stable release, main at version v0.1.0, has been cut yet; that step works the same way and adds a signed build, an install check, and the package managers.

What you do, and what the agent does

You decide when to release. Your agent may run release for you; at your own terminal it asks you to confirm. CI is refused. To go to main, you say so on the Release issue yourself: comment Stable release: v0.1.0 as the first line. The agent cannot write that comment. Try --dry-run first: it shows what would ship and which stories would be stamped, and writes nothing.

release does the careful part: checks the list, builds the candidate, runs the gate, moves the branch, tags it, stamps the stories, writes the notes, and schedules the measurement.

What you learn

Measure-later only works if "later" is on the calendar. release puts it there for you.

The verbs in this step

Under the hood: the gates, the tags, goreleaser, cosign signatures, provenance, and how install.sh checks a download are in releases and the supply chain.

What's next

The work is out. Now the only question that matters, and you already have a first answer from 14:29: did the number move? Chapter 8, the number.

You are here: chapter 7 of 9. Goal · Plan · Promises · Build · Gate · Yes · Release · Number · Telling