We don't do quarterly retrospectives because they look good on a content calendar. We do them because every three months I sit down, look at the commit log, and genuinely cannot remember what we shipped in week two. This is that exercise, shared publicly because transparency is cheap and trust is expensive.
Signal Relay: Finally Live
The biggest thing we shipped in Q4 was Signal Relay, our MCP server that lets AI agents connect to SocioLogic's tools without any custom integration work. If you've used npx sociologic recently, Signal Relay is what's handling the connection between your AI assistant and our platform.
We'd been working on this since August, and the gap between "it works on my machine" and "it works for strangers on the internet" was about six weeks wider than we planned. The main culprits: WebSocket reconnection logic (harder than it sounds when you're dealing with agents that might go idle for hours) and auth token refresh timing. We shipped three hotfixes in the first week. Not our finest moment, but every one of those fixes came from real user reports, which meant real users were actually using it. I'll take that tradeoff.
CLI: From Rough to Reasonable
The CLI got a proper overhaul. The big changes:
- Interactive setup wizard that detects your environment and configures accordingly. No more copying config blocks from docs.
- Better error messages. Instead of cryptic stack traces, you get "Your API key doesn't have permission for this. Run
sociologic auth refreshto fix it." We went through every error path and wrote human sentences. - Offline mode. Persona creation and campaign drafting now work without an active connection. Sync when you're ready.
- Speed. Cold start dropped from 3.2 seconds to 800ms. Warm starts are under 200ms. We rewrote the dependency loader and it made a bigger difference than expected.
The CLI is the front door for most developers. If it feels slow or confusing, nothing else matters. We're not done here, but it's in a decent place now.
First Verified Agents in the Registry
We onboarded the first 14 verified agents into the registry. These are third-party services that have gone through our verification process: identity confirmed, capabilities tested, uptime monitored, billing active.
Fourteen doesn't sound like a lot, and it isn't. But each one required us to actually run the verification pipeline end-to-end with a real external team, which surfaced a bunch of process gaps. The verification spec looked great on paper. In practice, we needed to add a sandbox testing phase, clarify what "capability" means when an agent does five different things, and build a dispute resolution flow we hadn't anticipated needing yet.
The registry is still invite-only. We're opening it up in Q1, but we wanted to get the process right with a small group first.
The Billing Migration
This is the one that almost broke us. We migrated from our legacy credits system to x402 micropayments on Base. The old system worked fine for our early users, but it was a closed loop: buy credits from us, spend credits with us. That doesn't work when you want agents paying other agents across organizational boundaries.
The migration itself was straightforward. The communication around it was not. We underestimated how attached some users were to the credits model, mostly because it was simple and they already understood it. We ended up running both systems in parallel for six weeks instead of the planned two, wrote a migration guide that went through four drafts, and personally helped about twenty teams switch over.
Lesson learned: billing changes are identity changes for your users. Treat them accordingly.
By the Numbers
- 237 commits merged to main
- 14 verified agents onboarded
- 3 major incidents (all resolved within 4 hours)
- CLI cold start: 3.2s to 800ms
- Signal Relay uptime after stabilization: 99.7%
What's Next
Q1 2026 is about opening up. Public registry access, more integration partners, and a tutorial push to lower the barrier for new developers. We're also spending a lot of time on edge deployment, but Sarah will have more to say about that soon.
Thanks to everyone who filed issues, sent us angry DMs about the billing migration, and generally kept us honest. Onward.