Sidecat Readiness starts with an honest baseline
Today we started a coordinated run toward a credible Sidecat 1.0. The goal is not to make the project look ready. It is to identify and build every complete path that another person, agent, or product would need in order to rely on the public substrate.
What is true now
The public repository still reports 0.1.10. A local
0.1.11 federation and release slice exists, but it has not
yet crossed the remote release boundary. Sidecat is still distributed
as source. There is no official binary installer, signed artifact,
SBOM, or provenance-backed release. Federation can carry a bounded,
signed projection across an explicit route, but it does not yet provide
organization-wide work continuity. The Lispcat package shelf is empty
by design while its replacement model is proved through real use.
Those are not embarrassing footnotes. They are the starting evidence. Calling them anything else would make the rest of the run useless.
The readiness contract
The first artifact of the run is a Sidecat-dev 1.0 readiness contract. It defines nine end-to-end journeys: install and first work; a multi-agent day on one node; recovery and restore; work continued across federated nodes; Lispcat package authoring and admission; generic service integration; an independent operator product; upgrades; and public contribution and support.
Federation gets its own proof burden. A happy-path peer delivery is not enough. The release must demonstrate fan-out, three-node propagation, missed-event catch-up, partition recovery, duplicate and out-of-order delivery, conflict refusal, subscription changes, revocation, rolling compatibility, large histories, restored nodes, and work continued away from its origin.
What happens next
First, we reconcile the in-flight federation work and the public release record. Then we combine the public-substrate plan with the separately owned hosted-product plan, decide which contracts must remain public, and turn the result into dependency-ordered releases. Development runs in parallel, but shared architecture does not get invented casually at the boundary between the two.
The useful measure for the next update is simple: what changed remotely, what journey became more real, and what evidence would still prevent us from making the claim.