A bounded source-linked orientation memory plus a shared state / evidence / permission contract across terminal, server, editor, bridge, and agents. Handoffs become first-class artifacts: the workbench knows where it left off, what it owes, what it changed, and how to resume. Provider abstraction lands so model selection is invisible to the rest of the system — and Hugging Face Inference Providers becomes a first-class provider alongside DeepSeek and OpenRouter, anchoring the harness's open-model story.

In scope

• Evidence ledger. Every receipt from v0.8.43 + every decision card + every tool inspection + every memory entry compounds into a per-session evidence ledger. Inspectable, exportable, queryable from /evidence.
• Handoff artifacts. Closing a workbench session writes a handoff artifact (goal, last state, blockers, decisions, evidence). Opening one resumes the workbench — "Resume previous workbench" surfaces matching artifacts.
• Orientation cache. Bounded, source-linked, evidence-tagged. Decays as freshness drops. First-class fact source from codewhale.net/api/state.json (latest release, install commands per platform, published crates, known-bad version ranges).
• Provider abstractions. Unified Provider trait in codewhale-agent consolidating env-var precedence, secret resolution, base-URL normalization, and auth-header construction (currently scattered across crates/config, crates/secrets, crates/tui/src/client.rs). ProviderKind registry becomes configurable; model selection is provider-agnostic.
• Hugging Face as a first-class provider. New [providers.huggingface] config block with api_key (default HF_TOKEN, alias HUGGINGFACE_API_KEY), base_url (default https://router.huggingface.co/v1), and provider = "auto" (or a specific Inference Provider). OpenAI-compatible route. Model picker pulls model passport metadata from the HF Hub API (license, base model, context length, chat template, tool-call support, reasoning support, gated / private status). Distinct from the Hugging Face Workset (#1977) which adds Hub registry / datasets / adapters / Jobs — the two share auth but ship through different surfaces.
• Cross-surface alignment. Consistent command names, output formats, error messages across CLI (codewhale), TUI, runtime API (codewhale serve --http), bridges, and web.
• VS Code extension beta. Scaffold, local runtime detection, chat webview. Ship as VSIX attached to GitHub Release; not Marketplace-published until beta feedback.
• Protocol contract in crates/protocol carries provider-auth shape explicitly so external clients don't have to special-case.
• Per-tool migration PRs. Start ExternalTool migrations one tool at a time (git, gh, python, node, rust, cargo) with Windows CI green per step.

Out of scope

• New providers beyond the HF Inference Providers integration (the rest stay as they are).
• Cloud-hosted runtime API.
• Marketplace publish of VS Code extension.
• Plugin tool runtime implementation (still gated on v0.8.46 RFC).
• Model Lab workset implementation (post-v0.9.0; see #1977). The HF Workset specifically depends on this milestone's provider work landing first.

Definition of done

• Switching providers mid-session is one config change with no surrounding code change.
• Hugging Face Inference Providers works end-to-end against Qwen/*, deepseek-ai/*, and meta-llama/* model IDs without per-model special-casing in the engine.
• Model picker surfaces HF model passport metadata (license, context length, gated status) before selection.
• /evidence returns the per-session ledger.
• Closing and reopening a session restores the workbench state (active task, last decision, pending blockers).
• Orientation cache surfaces the latest published release within freshness window after restart.
• VS Code beta VSIX attached to v0.8.47 GitHub Release; smoke-tested against local runtime API.

Release gate

• Parity gates green.
• CHANGELOG.md [0.8.47] entry calls out HF as a first-class provider and provider abstractions as the model-neutral lever.
• README provider matrix + "Bring your own open-weight model" section updated; HF Inference Providers and OpenRouter framed as the open-model discovery+routing layer.