[antoinetoussaint-byte]

What broke

A tag whose release workflow fails stays on origin, because published tags are never moved (runbook: "the release commit and tag are immutable and remain even if the release workflow later fails"). tools/agentcontract took the previous release to be the newest stable tag merged into HEAD, then ran gh release download <tag> agent-requirements.json, which fails closed. So one burned tag blocks every later release:

• v0.1.216 (release: v0.1.216 #1190): failed at Qualify the clean tag on the GoReleaser 2.18 deprecation. Fixed by fix(release): drop the cask's url.verified, which GoReleaser 2.18 refuses as deprecated #1191.
• v0.1.217 (release: v0.1.217 #1192): failed at Prepare agent compatibility record with release not found for v0.1.216 (run 40440975313).

The change

previousTag now returns the newest stable tag merged into HEAD that has a published, non-draft GitHub release (gh release list --exclude-drafts). It still fails closed in three cases:

• a release-listing error is returned (list published CLI releases: …);
• stable tags exist but none has a release: that is an error, never a silent "first release";
• the listing is skipped only when no stable tag precedes the current one, which is the existing first-release path.

The runbook's If it fails list gains one entry naming the burned-tag path.

Reused: the existing tag walk, the ls-tree introduction check, the asset download and the release-notes logic are unchanged. Classification: fix, in the tool that owns "which release is previous". No gate is relaxed: the asset is still required for the release that is chosen.

Verified

• go test ./tools/agentcontract: new cases for burned tags (newest two tags unreleased → picks the last released), a prerelease never chosen, no released stable tag → error, a listing error propagates, no stable tags → listing never called.
• Live repo at e89a8e57 (main), go run ./tools/agentcontract --tag v0.1.217:
  • on main: read previous CLI contract: exit status 1, the CI failure reproduced;
  • on this branch: exit 0, notes say Agent requirements unchanged from v0.1.215.

After merge

codefly publish cuts v0.1.218 from main. v0.1.216 and v0.1.217 remain tags without releases.

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