What's new

Three reviewer must-fix items closed before merge — Stage 4 (Verify) artifact contract, /method/principles SERP-friendly title, and a composite DeviceLogin index for the cleanup path. The artifact-contract gap was the most consequential: /walkthrough, /pr-review, and the hotfix close-out now produce 07-walkthrough.md, 08-review-report.md, and 10-postmortem.md on disk instead of replying in chat, so /redo cascade and /method-check stop pointing at files that never existed.

Copy and UI polish across the public Method pages — clearer prose on /method/principles and /docs/method, plus a real example artifact preview so readers learn that Method artifacts are markdown prose rather than YAML or checklists.

Foundation fixes from the Method frontend content review — the install section in /docs/method now lists every flag users actually need (--api-key, --agent, --global, --all, --no-init-method), and Principle 6 on /method/principles correctly distinguishes /walkthrough (user POV) from /pr-review (diff vs artifacts) instead of conflating the two.

Review polish on v1.7.0 + v1.8.0 — closes a false-positive in advisory CAS for legacy v1 state reads, adds a manual cascade hint when /redo design changes user-facing affordances, and surfaces typo suggestions on unknown installer flags.

Phase 2 closer for Frenchie Method — installer ergonomics, an explicit cleanup policy on /job-done, and three new task types (refactor, tech-debt, dep-bump) with their own shorter workflow. Phase 2 backlog from the implementation review is now fully closed.

Frenchie Method gets multi-worktree clarity, a real back-edge command, and an advisory concurrency model. Active feature is derived from your worktree and branch instead of a marker file. /redo <stage> marks a stage as needing rework and cascades staleness to downstream artifacts. state.json bumps to schema v2 with lastModifiedAt + lastModifiedBy so two agents on the same feature folder cannot silently overwrite each other.

Review polish on v1.6.0 + v1.6.1 — two more WCAG 2.2 AA criteria cited (Reflow at 320 CSS px and Focus Not Obscured), the "new in 2.2" markers made consistent across 2.4.11 / 2.5.8 / 3.3.7, hotfix gets a precise definition of user-impacting SEV3, spike workflow uses date placeholders and adds a visible frozen-at marker on promote, and the PR description template clarifies the mixed-PR tiebreaker.

Frenchie Method's hotfix and spike workflows are no longer one-line stubs. Hotfix gets a SEV1-SEV4 triage decision tree mapping severity to recommended gates. Spike gets a 2-working-day default timebox and an explicit promote-or-discard contract that reuses the spike folder when the team decides to ship.

Frenchie Method gets the first wave of Phase 2 polish — clearer reference content for design, security, and architecture; a real 05-design.md template; Gherkin acceptance criteria with AC-NNN traceability; and a structured PR description so agents stop producing freeform PR bodies. Public Method principles page no longer advertises a 05-task.md artifact that never existed.

Frenchie now has a clearer product shape: Frenchie Method for requirement-to-release agent work, Frenchie Kit for file and multimodal tools, and `npx @lab94/frenchie login` for browser-approved local setup. The marketing surface, docs, MCP server card, installer copy, and Method public principles were updated together so users no longer have to guess where workflow ends and file processing begins.

`install --global` is now upgrade-mode. Running `npx @lab94/frenchie install --global` (no `--agent`) scans every `$HOME` MCP config and rewrites the pinned package spec on entries that already declare `frenchie`. Fixes the long-standing bug where Antigravity / Claude Desktop / Windsurf / Zed pinned versions would stay locked at whatever version you originally installed, even after running `install` repeatedly from a project.

Frenchie now adds `extract_to_markdown` for DOCX, XLSX, CSV, TSV, and PPTX files. The worker validates ownership and MIME/magic bytes, estimates fractional extraction credits, runs jobs through the async queue, and returns the same Markdown result envelope used by OCR and transcription.

Dashboard sessions now fail like a product, not like a stack trace. If your web session credential expires while the browser still has an auth cookie, Frenchie sends you back to sign in with a clear note instead of dropping a Next.js server error digest.

Async image generation got a cleanup pass. Failed jobs now fail loudly, result retention starts when the image is first delivered, and missing image payloads return a clean expired response instead of a misleading `done` envelope.

Set a default transcription language once, stop repeating it on every call. New optional `FRENCHIE_DEFAULT_LANGUAGE` env (stdio) and `X-Frenchie-Default-Language` header (HTTP) feed `transcribe_to_markdown` when the tool input doesn't specify a language. Tool-level `language` always wins, so existing calls keep working unchanged.

Marketing surface is now **truly static** — `getfrenchie.dev` no longer issues NextAuth CSRF cookies on every page load and no longer ships `Cache-Control: no-cache` on HTML responses. The cold-cache TTFB tax (every request round-tripping to the Singapore origin even for visitors served from US/EU edges) is gone. The site header was split into a sync server shell + a `SiteHeaderClient` that hydrates auth state from `/api/session`, with an inline pre-paint script reading the session cookie to prevent any login-button flash.

Follow-up SEO bundle on top of v1.2.1 — `/compare/{slug}` pages ship a `Product` schema with one `PropertyValue` per side-by-side dimension so AI Overviews can quote specific Frenchie capabilities directly. Use-case `HowTo` steps expanded from one-liners to 2–3 sentences with concrete commands and filenames so AI engines have richer step text to recite. `Person` schema is **live** — every blog post now credits a named human author with verifiable LinkedIn + GitHub URLs (E-E-A-T uplift), and `/about` emits a top-level `Person` block. One-line `<link rel="llms-txt">` discovery hint added to every page head.

SEO, AEO, and GEO pass — `getfrenchie.dev` now ships a tighter SERP snippet on every page, an aggregated `/faq` hub, a `/glossary`, machine-readable favicon and theme-color, RSS auto-discovery, and a 308 (permanent) apex → www redirect. Schema markup picks up `WebSite`, `DefinedTermSet`, citations on `TechArticle`, and the public skill-mirror as a `sameAs` for entity-graph density. Open Graph on blog posts now carries `article:published_time`, `article:author`, `article:section`, and `article:tag` so Slack / Discord / Bluesky previews show byline + date. No product changes.

Frenchie now ships image generation alongside OCR and transcription. Same MCP install, same credit ledger — agents can call `generate_image` with a prompt and get a PNG (or JPEG / WebP) back. Stdio mode auto-saves the image next to your work; HTTP mode hands cloud agents a 30-minute presigned URL. 20 credits per image, refunded automatically on failure.

Two fixes to how the `@lab94/frenchie` skill pack teaches agents to use Frenchie — the `/ocr` and `/transcribe` HTTP flow now routes through the built-in `upload_file` MCP tool, and the stdio workflow docs now match what the server actually returns.

Navbar and footer grew up a little. Nothing changed about OCR or transcription — just easier to get around the site.

Paved the road for PulseMCP and Smithery directory listings. `@lab94/frenchie` is now MIT licensed, and every release gets mirrored to a public GitHub repo at `Lab94/frenchie-skill`. The monorepo stays private — only the skill package (what you already install via npm) gets mirrored, with `packages/shared/` inlined so the repo builds standalone.

Typography overhaul plus docs navigation polish. Every heading, label, and body across marketing, docs, and dashboard now reads from one unified scale — generous, friendly, Linear-flavoured. No more 11–14px labels that made the console feel like a sysadmin tool.

Upgrade guide is now on the web. Every link to the old GitHub-hosted MIGRATION.md has been replaced with `getfrenchie.dev/docs/migrate` — external users can finally read it.

Re-installing Frenchie no longer asks for your API key every time. `npx @lab94/frenchie install` is now idempotent — pass `--api-key` on the first install, and every re-run reuses the stored key.

Critical fix for local stdio installs. If you upgraded to 0.3.0 but your agent was still dumping full OCR markdown into context, this is the one — re-run `npx @lab94/frenchie@latest install` after the new release drops.

One-command local installs got broader. Frenchie is stdio-first now, and Antigravity finally gets the same first-tier path as the other local editors.

Quieter HTTP mode. Some MCP hosts were chasing an SSE stream we don't run.

HTTP mode gets real file downloads. No more inline base64 eating your agent's tokens.

The first one. Frenchie is live.