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What’s New in v0.9.0

⚠️ Experimental — Squad is alpha software. APIs, commands, and behavior may change between releases.

This is Squad’s biggest release. Personal Squad brings ambient agent discovery and project portability. Worktree spawning isolates each issue into its own branch. Cooperative rate limiting maps traffic across multi-agent teams. Economy Mode lets you budget costs. A complete docs refresh, security hardening, and community contributions make this one to upgrade for.

What Shipped

1. Personal Squad — Ambient Agent Discovery (#508)

Your Squad follows you across repositories.

Personal agents are ambient: you configure them once, and they’re automatically available in every project you work on — no per-repo setup needed. They discover the projects they work in through the Ghost Protocol: safe interaction that respects your project’s boundaries without disrupting other work.

CLI commands:

squad personal init          # Declare your personal agents
squad personal list          # See what's available

Governance layer — Personal agents declare what they need (memory, tools, platforms) and operate within guardrails. A personal coding agent won’t blindly touch your enterprise repo; it reads your project’s agent charters and .squad/config.json first.

What this enables:

:::tip Personal Squad is foundational. It’s how your favorite coding agent follows you into a new project without needing re-hiring. :::

2. Worktree Spawning — No More Branch Conflicts (#529)

Each issue gets its own git worktree.

Before: Agents working on multiple issues could block each other on branch conflicts. Now, every issue spawns an isolated worktree. Agents work in parallel, in separate filesystem branches, without touching the main worktree.

What it solves:

How it works:

This is the foundation for true parallel work at scale.

3. Machine Capability Discovery — Routing to Capable Hardware (#514)

Agents declare what they need. Ralph routes work to machines that can handle it.

Use needs:* labels to tell Ralph what hardware an issue requires:

needs:docker        # This agent needs Docker
needs:gpu           # CUDA-capable GPU required
needs:16gb-memory   # At least 16GB RAM
needs:k8s           # Kubernetes cluster access

Ralph’s dispatcher reads these labels and routes the work to the machine in your squad pool that has those capabilities. No more “sorry, I can’t run Docker here.”

Real-world scenarios:

:::note Capability Discovery works with Ralph’s mesh routing. If you’re not running Ralph, this is aspirational. :::

4. Cooperative Rate Limiting — Predictive Circuit Breaker (#515)

Multi-agent teams share rate limits responsibly.

Squad now implements RAAS — Rate-Aware Agent Scheduler. When your API calls trigger rate limiting, Squad maps X-RateLimit-Remaining headers to traffic light states:

Multi-agent coordination: All agents in your squad see the same traffic light state. When one agent hits amber, the entire team backs off. No thundering herd, no cascading failures.

Error surfacing: Rate limit errors now surface with recovery suggestions:

⚠️ API rate limit reached. Waiting 15 seconds before retry.
Agent: MyAgent | Remaining: 0/60 | Resets: 14:32 UTC
Suggestion: 1 agent idle, 2 backing off. Try serial mode with --cooperative-delay=30s

5. Economy Mode — Cost-Conscious Model Selection (#500)

Budget-aware routing falls back to cheaper models when spend is high.

When your monthly LLM budget climbs, Economy Mode kicks in:

squad skill economy-mode enable --budget=50  # USD per agent per day

Now when Claude-Sonnet (expensive) would exceed budget, the router automatically falls back to Claude-Haiku (70% cheaper). The agent still completes the work — just with a more efficient model.

Governance:

const role = await squad.resolveRole('coding-agent', {
  economyMode: true,  // Use cheaper models if budget allows
  budgetPerDay: 50,   // USD
});

Real-world impact:

6. Auto-Wired Telemetry (#281)

One call to wire up full observability.

initSquadTelemetry() now auto-creates the EventBus and CostTracker:

import { initSquadTelemetry } from '@bradygaster/squad-sdk';

const { eventBus, costTracker } = await initSquadTelemetry({
  endpoint: 'https://my-telemetry.com',  // Optional; omit for in-process
});

// eventBus is live, costTracker is live
// All agent work auto-reports to both

What you get:

No more hunting for telemetry wiring. One call, full observability.

7. Upgrade Path Overhaul — P0 Fixes (#544, #549)

Windows EPERM handling — File permission errors on Windows no longer break upgrades. Automatic retry with temporary directory fallback.

Gitignore parent coverage — Upgrade now respects .gitignore files in parent directories, preventing unintended file inclusion.

Context-aware footer — Upgrade footer includes your project’s context: org name, repo, branch, so you know exactly what was upgraded.

P0 fixes across the board:

8. Documentation Refresh

README slimmed: 512 → 218 lines. Removed noise, kept substance.

Upgrade section: New dedicated docs guide for trouble-free version bumps, with platform-specific steps for Windows, macOS, Linux.

Consistent install path: All user-facing docs now reference npm install -g @bradygaster/squad-cli.

Astro features: 10 new Astro features implemented — section badges, improved search with Pagefind, better syntax highlighting.

Teams MCP refresh: Microsoft Teams integration updated for Workflows webhooks. Full docs at Teams integration guide.

Autonomous agents guide: New guide for building agents that work unsupervised. How to set guardrails, declare intentions, handle escalation.

9. Quality & Stability

10. Community Contributions

Worktree regression tests — @diberry added tests that guard against regressions in worktree .git handling (file vs. directory).

Docs improvements — @diberry contributed docs expansion for CLI README and reference.

Community security review — Thanks to @wiisaacs and the community for 5-model security review of platform adapters.

Quick Stats

Breaking Changes

None. All changes are additive. Existing Squads work as-is. New features are opt-in via CLI or config.

Upgrading

Upgrade to v0.9.0 with:

npm install -g @bradygaster/squad-cli

Then:

squad upgrade  # Walks you through any project-level config updates

Docs: Upgrade Guide | Troubleshooting

If you hit issues, open a GitHub issue. We’re here to help.

What’s Next

This is an exciting time. v0.9.0 is the release where Squad scales from solo developers to distributed teams.

Questions? Drop by Squad Discussions or ping us on Discord.

Want to contribute? Check out Contributing Guide. We’re hiring agents (and humans who build them).