Bernstein — Multi-Agent Orchestration

Version updated for https://github.com/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein to version v3.17.1.

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Action Type

This is a Composite action.

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Action Summary

Bernstein is a deterministic multi-agent CLI orchestration tool that automates complex workflows and tasks, ensuring reproducibility across different environments. It simplifies the management of multiple agents in distributed systems and helps developers achieve consistent results by defining clear plans and policies for task execution.

What’s Changed

A patch release about one thing: a container run that starts from an issue number and is still alive an hour later.

Agents stopped dying

The heartbeat was refreshed by a shell loop pasted into the agent’s own prompt. A model that ignored the block was killed for ignoring it. The worker writes it now, where the orchestrator reads it (#4330).

Four subsystems read that number. The recycler and the escalation ladder disagreed about the same agent, and the harsher one won (#4314). The stalled-manager detector went by wall-clock runtime alone, ignoring the liveness verdict from the same tick (#4338).

A dead agent’s uncommitted work survives: the orphan path built a request body httpx could not encode, and the error killed the tick before the commit ran (#4345).

Runs recover on their own

A run with a high error rate blocked every new spawn wave, which is also how it stayed at a high error rate; the gate waits for three observations now (#4336). Agent process deaths counted as task failures (#4310). A failed planning task’s retry raced a sibling that had already done the same decomposition (#4309).

The gate graded the wrong tree

Agents commit in their own worktree, and the merge back waits for the gate — so the gate graded a checkout missing the work under review. A task whose acceptance signal named a file it had just written could never pass. It had done this for as long as the gate has existed. The verdict is computed on the merged result now (#4367).

The task graph

An inferred file-overlap edge could contradict an explicit depends_on and fabricate a two-node cycle, after which topological_order returned nothing and every task read as blocked (#4366). A declared cycle no longer wedges the scheduler either (#4299).

PostgreSQL

Five bugs, all in the code that claims a task: two ignored the claiming role, one raised on a parameter the store did not accept, one queried a tenant column the schema never created, and create() raised ImportError (#4323, #4325, #4328, #4332, #4333).

Upgrade note: tasks written before this release carry no recorded tenant and land in the default scope; on a multi-tenant install the original scope is not recoverable.

Models and transport

Retry escalation replaced the model an operator pinned with a hard-coded Claude tier name (#4274). A model: in bernstein.yaml or --model now suppresses model escalation on retry; effort still escalates. An agent that exits without spending a token no longer spends the retry budget (#4275).

The MCP bridge pointed at a module with no __main__ guard: it imported, exited 0, and never answered the handshake. Every agent reported the bridge as disconnected and nobody read the init event (#4313, #4315).

Also

The manager prompt never showed how to set depends_on, so QA started before the module it tested existed (#4311). The PR a run opens no longer describes a run it cannot find (#4349). Adapters declare which channel carries system_addendum (#4256). On a TTY, bernstein run says it is waiting for the first agent (#4257).

Soundtrack: https://suno.com/s/sQ51WglS4Qzj9eIN

What’s Changed

New Contributors

Full Changelog: https://github.com/sipyourdrink-ltd/bernstein/compare/v3.17.0...v3.17.1