orion v0.8.6

August 31, 2026

docs/decisions/0015 records who gates a merge once CI runs on an ephemeral merge ref instead of on each branch's pull request (OR-236). Orion is the authority on landing, and develop keeps a post-merge check on push as the backstop — a workflow trigger rather than branch protection, so it works on the free private repositories where protection returns 403. The record also binds OR-236 to two guards: an empty check rollup must stop reading as passing, and auto_merge.require_checks must actually be read (OR-237).
orion watch now pins a live run display to the bottom of the terminal, redrawn about four times a second: one row per running ticket with a braille spinner, its stage, elapsed time, a bar measured against that actor's median run duration in this project, a sparkline of tool calls per 10s over the last two minutes, and the tool-call count. The bar is a reference, never a prediction — past the median it fills, stops, and the row says running long with the median beside it. A run that has made no tool call for a minute reports quiet Xm, so a stalled run and a busy one can never look the same. Off a terminal there is no cursor control at all: one plain line per run per tick, so a redirected log stays a log. NO_COLOR keeps the layout and drops the escape codes and glyphs; TERM=dumb gets the plain form.

orion explore now takes several questions in one call — orion explore "<question>" "<question>" "<question>" — and answers them concurrently, one subagent each, capped by limits.max_concurrent_children. A single question behaves exactly as before. One question failing no longer costs you the answers to the others; the batch only sends you back to reading for yourself when every question failed.
The implementer's prompt now opens with an exploration phase: work out what you do not know and ask all of it before reading, rather than one question at a time. Asked one at a time the agent waits out each round trip and greps instead, which is the context cost the command exists to remove.
A fan-out now announces its roster before dispatch and marks each child as it lands, with the verdict and the running count, so several concurrent subagents are legible while they run rather than a silent gap ending in a wall of output.

A watcher tick with nothing in flight and nothing awaiting CI now prints nothing. It used to print checking for tickets awaiting CI... followed by nothing is waiting on CI. every sixty seconds, which read as an idle system while agents were working. orion collect typed by hand still reports both.
The warning that a run inherited your Claude Code configuration because a curated config directory cannot authenticate on this platform now prints once per process instead of once per run. It is a property of the machine, not of the ticket.