pi validates its docs navigation in tests and codifies release guidance as skills

Both pull requests merged into the pi coding agent on September 9, 2026 target documentation rather than the agent runtime. christianklotz’s #9380 gives the docs site’s navigation manifest a validation layer inside the test suite, and davidbrai’s #9370 extracts interactive-testing and release guidance into repository skills. As with the batches before them, neither has shipped — both sit on main heading for the release after v0.85.1.

#9380 promotes packages/coding-agent/docs/docs.json to the versioned, recursive navigation manifest for the website. The coding-agent test suite now validates the navigation structure, page paths, duplicate slugs, local Markdown links, and reachability from navigation roots — broken links and unreachable pages fail checks before they ship. Documentation eval cases are discovered directly from every Markdown file, independent of navigation, so eval coverage follows the files rather than the tree.

#9370 adds two skill files under .pi/skills/ — interactive-testing.md and release.md — with AGENTS.md touched alongside. The release skill codifies what used to live in convention: lockstep versioning across all packages (patch for fixes and additions, minor for breaking changes, no major releases), the /cl changelog audit that must run before a release, local smoke tests for both Node and Bun release binaries driven from tmux sessions outside the repo, and the publish path where a pushed tag triggers npm trusted publishing through GitHub Actions OIDC and a verified marker in R2 backs pi.dev/api/latest-version. The interactive-testing skill is its companion: a controlled tmux workflow for TUI behavior checks and release smoke tests, including the rule that startup alone is not a passing smoke test.

Documentation merges rarely headline a release — the full validation suite and both skill texts are readable on the #9380 and #9370 pages on GitHub.