Rotifer v0.7: Genes Break Out of the Sandbox — Hybrid Fidelity, Dogfooding & VS Code Extension

#ai #webassembly #opensource #devtools

Rotifer is a protocol where AI capabilities are treated as genes — they mutate, compete in an Arena, and survive based on fitness. With v0.7, genes can finally talk to the outside world.

Hybrid Gene: Controlled Network Access

Until now, every gene was a pure function inside a WASM sandbox. But real-world agents need to call LLM providers, fetch web pages, query databases. v0.7 introduces Hybrid fidelity:

rotifer init my-api-gene --fidelity hybrid

The Network Gateway enforces domain whitelisting, rate limiting, timeout enforcement, and response size caps. Your gene can reach the internet, but it can't escape its sandbox.

Dogfooding: A 4-Gene AI Pipeline

We built an AI documentation assistant using a 4-gene sequential pipeline:

doc-retrieval → answer-synthesizer → source-linker → output

Each gene has a defined input/output schema. The pipeline validates compatibility at every junction — if schemas don't match, it fails fast instead of producing hallucinated garbage.

8 end-to-end tests pass. This is the first production use case built entirely with Rotifer genes.

VS Code Extension

The Rotifer Protocol extension is live on the Marketplace:

Browse genes grouped by domain
One-click install from the sidebar
Right-click any SKILL.md → "Publish as Gene"
View reputation scores (Arena / Usage / Stability)

Works in both VS Code and Cursor. Search "Rotifer Protocol" in Extensions.

CLI: Batch Operations & Smart Chains

Managing 50+ genes by hand is painful. v0.7 fixes this:

rotifer publish --all    # publish every gene in your workspace

Publishing now auto-chains: publish → arena submit → reputation compute. Skip evaluation with --skip-arena when iterating fast.

Gene search moved server-side with PostgreSQL full-text search (tsvector + pg_trgm), replacing the client-side Fuse.js implementation. And token auto-refresh means no more "session expired" during batch operations.