A lock the locked party could open

• An outside audit went through the checks Aura runs on your behalf, and the worst of what it found is in the title. Aura can be sealed in strict mode with a passcode, so that an agent cannot lift the restrictions a person put on it. An agent could lift them. Refused a dangerous command, it wrote down its reason for wanting to run that command — and Aura read the agent’s own note as the permission, so the second attempt was allowed with nobody asked. A note the agent writes itself can never be what opens a lock set against the agent. While the seal is on, a refused act now goes to a person, with what the agent said shown as its argument.
• Two more ways a check said clean without having looked. Code you protected could be quietly cut loose: Aura checked that the things on your protect list still existed, which is not the same as checking they still do anything, so a permission check could have its last use removed from the code that called it and sit there untouched, no longer running, while the commit passed. And a whole class of JavaScript and TypeScript file was never read at all — an unread file was skipped rather than reported as unread, so “nothing depends on this” and “nothing was removed” were being said about code nobody had opened. A project written that way was unprotected and told it was protected, which is worse than being told nothing. Both are checked properly now.
• The check that runs before you commit stops describing your whole project. Asked about a three-file commit, it answered about every file in the repository — “829 pieces of code look half-finished” — which is why the honest response to it here had become switching it off. It reads exactly what you are committing now, and reads the version you staged rather than whatever is open in your editor, so an unsaved experiment can no longer fail a commit that does not contain it.
• Buying Aura works. Every button on the pricing page pointed at an address no version of Aura has ever had, so “Start on Pro”, the trial and the closing Team trial all landed on a signed-in Not Found. And where a payment could be started, it was Pro’s checkout at $20 a seat whichever plan you had pressed — so a team choosing the $40 plan was subscribed to the other one. The buttons reach the right screen now, that screen names the plan you actually asked for, and the old address still works for anyone who bookmarked it.
• Four commands that answered confidently about the wrong thing. Aura could not see work you had staged, so staging a change and asking Aura to save it saved nothing at all. Asking why a line reads the way it does gave three guesses when it could not answer, one of them wrong for the commonest case. Asking why a file changed gave an unrelated answer once the file had been renamed, with nothing to say it had guessed. And the smart merge, when it gave up and left the conflict to you, said nothing — so a real disagreement and a file it had never read looked identical. Proving the same goal at the same point in your history gives the same answer twice now, too; it did not before.
• The web console keeps closing the gap with the app. Changes now says what changed in each file and by how much, and — this is the part your own machine cannot do — why: what was written about that file during the session, the message of the commit that carried it, and what was said about it in other sessions. A session that sent work out to other agents shows them, who sent which, and what each one reported back. Eleven controls that looked like they led somewhere and led nowhere were found and fixed, including the one button anywhere that starts a payment.
• Everyone on a shared machine is now their own person. Work done on a machine several people use was signed by whoever set that machine up, and pushed on their credential — so the record lost the person who actually did it. Each member gets a credential minted for them, which an admin can grant one member at a time and take back the moment they leave. The per-person spend figure works too; it had been reading zero for everybody because nothing was ever writing it down.
• Two people can now be in one session, and several copies of one project can see each other’s work in progress while each keeps its own sessions to itself. The phone app is repainted in the desktop’s dark blocks and wears the real Aura mark, rather than a second design that had drifted.