AIWG 2026.11.1 brings skill discovery back. In Claude Code and Muse you can describe what you want in plain words, and AIWG puts the best matching skills in front of your assistant before it starts. This release also adds checkpoints for picking up long work where you left it, makes worker runs more dependable on a busy machine, and includes security fixes.
What went wrong with discovery
AIWG ships hundreds of skills, agents and rules. You are not expected to know their names. The idea has always been that you ask for what you want, and your assistant looks up the matching skill and follows it.
Over the last few releases we cut down the instructions AIWG loads when a session starts. Long startup files cost context on every request, so we moved most of the detail into rules and skills that load when they are needed. That part worked. The side effect was that assistants often stopped checking for a matching skill at all. Asked to review code or plan a release, they improvised from general knowledge instead of using the AIWG skill written for the job.
How 2026.11.1 fixes it
Three changes work together.
First, a new prompt-time hook. When a new request arrives in Claude Code or Muse, AIWG runs a read-only lookup and adds up to three matching skills to the assistant's context, with the steps to load them. Ask
Review the authentication code for security issues.
and the assistant sees something like skill security-review (0.92): Review code for security issues, followed by how to open it. The suggestions are hints. The assistant still reads the skill's instructions before acting on them.
The hook stays out of the way of short replies. It skips acknowledgements like "yes" or "ok", option picks and slash commands. It never edits or blocks your prompt, and if the lookup takes longer than 1.5 seconds it gives up silently. To turn it off, set AIWG_PROMPT_DISCOVERY=0 in your assistant's environment.
Second, AIWG's discovery rule now asks the assistant to look up skills at the start of every new request, not only when the request mentions AIWG or uses words like "skill" or "workflow". Follow-ups to a request it already looked up are exempt.
Third, aiwg discover itself is faster and quieter. A lookup that took about 2.8 seconds on a loaded machine now takes about 1 second. A notice that used to print on every call is gone, and a single shared word no longer ranks as a full match, so the top results are closer to what you asked for.
Codex support for the prompt-time hook follows in 2026.11.2.
Save your place in long work
Long tasks get interrupted. A checkpoint records where to pick up:
aiwg checkpoint create --name next-step --note "Continue the draft"
aiwg checkpoint list
aiwg checkpoint recover next-step
You can also record a phase, a step and related files with --phase, --step and --artifact. A checkpoint keeps the working directory and Git commit when they are available. recover tells you where to resume and never changes your repository.
Worker runs on a busy machine
If you hand work to coding CLIs as workers, several fixes land for machines under load. A worker that exits quickly is now confirmed as stopped instead of being reported as uncertain. Each attempt's output is sealed read-only, and a retry cannot reuse an earlier attempt's output path. Relaunching a task is refused while its earlier attempt is still unconfirmed.
Workers from other projects on the same machine no longer use up this project's worker or review slots, though the machine's overall limits still apply. Launch errors now name the flag that was wrong, and a final-output folder that does not exist yet no longer causes a false "free disk not detectable" failure.
Opening and merging pull requests
aiwg run skill aiwg-pr opens and merges pull requests. You choose how merges happen: signed local merges, unsigned local merges, or merges through your tracker, which is the default. Signing is optional. If signing is configured and no merge route is set, the merge stops and asks you to choose one rather than guessing.
Security fixes and Flue
This release fixes advisories in the zod copy carried by @fortemi/core, and moves the CLI and VS Code extension to glob and minimatch releases that fix two more.
If you use @aiwg/flue, upgrade. A new release of one of its dependencies broke fresh installs of 2026.11.0 with "does not provide an export named 'Type'". 2026.11.1 pins that dependency to a working version, and the Node Flue example no longer crashes at startup.
Upgrading
Install the release:
npm install -g [email protected]
Then re-run your usual aiwg use command in each project, for example aiwg use all. That installs the prompt-time hook into Claude Code and Muse and keeps any hooks you added yourself. If you want the hook off everywhere, set AIWG_PROMPT_DISCOVERY=0 instead of skipping the update.
Try it
After upgrading, open Claude Code or Muse in a project and ask for something in plain words, such as "plan the next release" or "review this module for security problems". The assistant should name the AIWG skill it found before it starts.
The full release notes list every change, and the GitHub changelog has the full history.