### New Features
- **Verifiable release source archives** — GitHub releases now include deterministic, checksummed source archives with instructions for rebuilding standalone binaries. See [Building standalone binaries from release source](https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/v0.81.1/README.md#building-standalone-binaries-from-release-source).
- **Resilient compaction and branch summaries** — Transient provider failures now follow the configured retry policy, with retry lifecycle events available to interactive, JSON, RPC, and SDK consumers. See [Compaction & Branch Summarization](https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/v0.81.1/packages/coding-agent/docs/compaction.md) and [RPC retry events](https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/blob/v0.81.1/packages/coding-agent/docs/rpc.md#summarization_retry_scheduled--summarization_retry_attempt_start--summarization_retry_finished).
### Added
- Added deterministic, checksummed source archives to GitHub releases with documented standalone binary rebuild instructions ([#6913](https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/pull/6913) by [@christianklotz](https://github.com/christianklotz)).
### Fixed
- Fixed compaction and branch summarization to retry transient provider failures using the configured retry policy, with retry lifecycle events exposed to interactive, JSON, RPC, and SDK consumers ([#6901](https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/pull/6901) by [@davidbrai](https://github.com/davidbrai)).
- Fixed interactive startup waiting for background model catalog refresh while computing the footer provider count.
- Restored the default stream fallback for extensions using the pre-0.81 agent-core API ([#6915](https://github.com/earendil-works/pi/issues/6915)).
- Fixed inherited Kimi K3 models from Moonshot AI and Moonshot AI China to use the OpenAI thinking format and expose reasoning effort support.