v1.21.0

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Highlights

• StepResult pattern across Agent, Chat, ToolUse, and Collaboration with immutable steps and explicit continuation outcomes.
• Continuation evaluation is unified around ContinuationEvaluation and ContinuationOutcome, with clearer stop reasons.
• Retry policy handling is explicit for Inference and Embeddings (no more retryPolicy inside options).
• Hub status persistence now tolerates malformed UTF-8 output instead of failing to write status data.

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Breaking Changes

• Continuation interfaces CanDecideToContinue, CanExplainContinuation, and CanProvideStopReason were removed. Custom criteria must implement CanEvaluateContinuation and return ContinuationEvaluation.
• Error handling classes moved from Cognesy\Addons\StepByStep\Continuation to Cognesy\Addons\StepByStep\ErrorHandling.
• retryPolicy is no longer accepted in options or LLMConfig options. Use explicit retry policy objects.
• Continuation outcomes are no longer stored on step objects. Use StepResult or state accessors instead.

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Agent, Chat, ToolUse, Collaboration

• States now store StepResult collections and serialize them.
• canContinue() reads from the last step result; mismatches between steps and step results now raise a logic error.
• Message compilation supports summary and buffer sections for inference context.
• Token usage is accumulated before continuation evaluation so usage limits are accurate.

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StepByStep / Continuation

• ContinuationCriteria composes CanEvaluateContinuation criteria and exposes evaluateAll() with aggregated outcomes.
• Criteria classes return richer ContinuationEvaluation objects with explicit decisions and stop reasons.
• New outcome helpers provide derived decision, resolver, and stop reason from evaluations.

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Polyglot / Inference and Embeddings

• InferenceRequest and EmbeddingsRequest now carry retry policies explicitly.
• InferenceRequestBuilder and request builder traits expose withRetryPolicy().
• PendingInference and PendingEmbeddings pull retry policies from requests rather than options.

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Hub

• Status JSON encoding now substitutes invalid UTF-8 bytes to avoid failures when saving example output.

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Migration from v1.20.0

• Update custom continuation criteria to implement CanEvaluateContinuation and return ContinuationEvaluation (replace CanDecideToContinue, CanExplainContinuation, CanProvideStopReason).
• Update imports to the new error handling namespace: Cognesy\Addons\StepByStep\ErrorHandling\*.
• Remove retryPolicy from LLM or request options. Use withRetryPolicy() on inference/embeddings builders or requests.
• Replace any step-level continuation outcome access with state->continuationOutcome() or state->lastStepResult().