STAGE 0.5.2

Released: 2026-07-22

STAGE 0.5.2 is a routing and ownership-correction release. It keeps the 0.5 Practitioner Kernel, artifact schemas, and human authority model unchanged.

Why This Patch Exists

STAGE had already retired its detached screenshot, contact-sheet, and HTML rehearsal pipeline, but active guidance still retained generic and Unity "product gallery" recipes. That left a misleading escalation path: a visual review could still grow a STAGE-owned gallery even when the project had no independent need for that feature.

The Circussy One dogfood exposed the simpler boundary. Visual diagnosis belongs in the real engine or game route. A codex, bestiary, gallery, model viewer, world previewer, replay browser, or inspect mode can still be valuable, but it is ordinary game or authoring work with its own user, architecture, and acceptance criteria.

Changes

• Remove the generic and Unity gallery recipe documents from active STAGE.
• Consolidate their useful safeguards into Visual Review and the Unity profile: canonical content, production rendering and motion, editable presentation, readiness, lifecycle, complete input paths, procedural replay, and rendered verification.
• Route independently justified codices and galleries back through ordinary stage-deliver-change instead of treating them as review infrastructure.
• Preserve historical ADRs and trials as evidence of how the boundary was corrected.
• Clarify that fresh-process default routing and interactive explicit-skill invocation must be verified through their actual Codex consumer surfaces.

ADR 0038 records the ownership decision and its evidence limits.

Practitioner Impact

Ordinary visible work still starts through stage-deliver-change. Use stage-visual-review explicitly only for a bounded diagnosis that needs deeper native inspection. That skill hands back the live native surface; it does not bootstrap a persistent review product.

When a project needs a permanent codex, gallery, model viewer, world previewer, or inspect mode, request and deliver it like any other player or authoring feature. It may later help review only the production consumers and context it actually contains.

Compatibility

The plugin package version is 0.5.2; SPEC.md is method version 0.5. Project-map and case-study artifact versions 0.1 and 0.3 remain supported. No game-project artifact migration is required.

The deleted recipe paths were maintainer guidance, not public game-project artifacts. Historical studies and ADRs remain available, but active links now resolve to the consolidated Visual Review guidance.

Verification

The release is checked through:

• the complete STAGE release gate;
• direct Codex plugin and skill-package validation;
• repository-local Markdown-link and project-map validation;
• package-boundary and release-metadata tests; and
• a fresh local plugin installation reporting version 0.5.2.

Limitations

This correction is based primarily on same-owner dogfood and repository churn, not an independent controlled study. It does not claim that galleries, visual regression systems, or exported media are generally bad. It limits STAGE's ownership: each capability must be justified by and built for its real project or external consumer.