v1.2.0

[1.2.0] - 2026-06-05

14 commits since v1.1.0. Output overflow guard, cross-platform path normalization fixes, and a reliability pass.

Output Overflow Guard

Surgical-read commands (symbol, read, section, bash-output, web-output, and the rest) now cap oversized output before it reaches the model. When estimated tokens exceed the cap, the output is head-truncated on a line boundary. A marker line is appended naming the cap, the truncation ratio, and the narrowing action — symbol users get directed toward file::Class.method lookups, section users toward sub-headings, cached-output users toward --grep/--tail.

Default cap: 25,000 tokens. Configure via [overflow_guard] max_tokens in config.toml, override with TOKEN_GOAT_OVERFLOW_MAX_TOKENS=<n>, or disable with TOKEN_GOAT_OVERFLOW_GUARD=0 / [overflow_guard] enabled = false.

The estimator is deliberately conservative — 3 chars/token, same rate as the compaction manifest — so the cap is never under-applied. ANSI escapes are stripped before estimation since color codes inflate length without adding model-visible tokens. A single-line blob (no internal newlines) is sliced at the char budget so it cannot pass through whole.

Cross-Platform Path Normalization

Two fixes that make path-keyed caches work correctly across Windows, WSL, and Linux:

normalize_path / paths.normalize_key — Drive-letter lowercasing (C: → c:) is now unconditional. The previous guard sys.platform == "win32" meant a WSL process that emits a Windows-format path (C:/Users/…) produced a different cache key than a native Windows process reading the same file. Both now produce c:/users/….

hooks_skill.post_skill — Windows-style backslash paths like C:\Users\user\.claude\skills\ralph were not stripped on Linux because the inline guard used _os.sep (/ on Linux) instead of the string literal "\\". The inline block is now a call to _normalize_skill_name, which hardcodes "\\" and handles both separator styles on every platform.

Reliability

• Worker dirty-queue torn writes. Concurrent _append_dirty calls could produce truncated or concatenated JSON lines under write contention. An OS-level file lock (fcntl on POSIX, msvcrt on Windows) now serializes appends, same as the session cache.
• SQLite WAL checkpoint mode. Changed from RESTART to PASSIVE on connection open. RESTART waited for all readers to drain, blocking hook subprocesses for hundreds of milliseconds during active indexing. PASSIVE checkpoints cooperatively and does not wait.