Release Notes - v0.7.7

Release Window

2025-11-17 to 2026-01-24

Overview

This minor release series covers v0.7.7 through v0.7.7.4. The main theme was chat and MCP integration: tool access from chat, read operations, chained calls, role-aware permissions, production hardening, and eventually full story creation from chat. The series also added Grok model support, several editing UX improvements, and better story-management controls.

Highlights

• Integrated ETCH MCP tools into chat through the OpenAI Responses API flow.
• Added read operations, role-aware tool access, chained MCP calls, and chat context handling.
• Enabled full story creation from chat.
• Added Grok text and image model support.
• Improved story management, option editing, image-generation recovery, and image prompt handling.

Patch Milestones

v0.7.7 to v0.7.7.2

• Shipped the first MCP-in-chat release in v0.7.7.
• Added MCP read tools in v0.7.7.1.
• Added role-based tool access, user detail tooling, chained tool-call support, and a status box for MCP activity.
• Reached end-to-end story creation from chat in v0.7.7.2.

v0.7.7.2 follow-up fixes

• Fixed production MCP server behavior, base URL handling, public API URL handling, and JSON parsing in chat flows.
• Moved chat context handling into internal calls instead of leaking internal flags into public request bodies.
• Switched GPT-5 to the default model for new content paths.
• Added Cloudflare build fixes while production chat support was being stabilized.

v0.7.7.4 and surrounding work

• Added search and pagination to the manage-stories page.
• Added drag-and-drop ordering for node options on the edit page.
• Fixed image-layer settings modals and added a delete-image-settings action.
• Improved image generation polling and retry behavior after failed attempts.
• Added Grok support across multiple commits, including prompt truncation safeguards and debug improvements.
• Added image prompt persistence and a dedicated image prompt field, culminating in v0.7.7.4.

Other Notable Improvements

• Added dev-journal follow-up entries to document the Grok rollout and production fixes.
• Fixed edit-story behavior during the authoring UX pass.
• Improved content-violation handling so failed image requests surface less jank in the UI.
• Fixed links to initial nodes and refreshed the home page layout at the end of the series.

Migration Notes

• Chat can now invoke MCP-backed tooling as part of normal operation.
• GPT-5 became the default LLM during this series.
• Grok models were added as supported providers for both text and image generation paths.
• The authoring flow now preserves image prompt data more explicitly than in earlier releases.