qCoder

qCoder 0.6.0a22 is a behavior-changing pre-release successor to public qCoder 0.6.0a18. Its runtime implementation and product behavior are preserved from the immutable, unpublished qCoder 0.6.0a21 candidate, except for release identity, publication-truth documentation, mechanically resulting package metadata, and release-only verification. qCoder 0.6.0a21 was never public and is not a customer upgrade predecessor.

The public upgrade relationship is qCoder 0.6.0a18 → qCoder 0.6.0a22. The implementation lineage relationship is qCoder 0.6.0a21 → qCoder 0.6.0a22. These relationships are distinct and must not be conflated.

Relative to public qCoder 0.6.0a18, qCoder 0.6.0a22 changes the Current Loop contract from binding v44 / Current Step Contract v10 to binding v45 / Current Step Contract v11 and uses one contract- selected terminal-closure route for routine source work. When an exact native-edit integration is configured, a successful native edit drives qCoder’s independent validation, single registration, receipt, and source-stage stop without a redundant completion call or another interpretation of qCoder procedure. Hook-absent clients retain the fail-closed typed-completion route. The a18 → a22 upgrade is not behavior-preserving and is not a supported mid-step migration.

Plain 0.6.0a19 remains intentionally reserved and has no accepted frozen or public candidate. Plain 0.6.0a20 and plain 0.6.0a21 are immutable, unpublished, technically qualified, publication-truth-rejected, terminal, do-not-publish candidates. They are retained evidence, not customer releases or upgrade predecessors, and must not be repaired, rebuilt, replaced, tagged, published, or selected again.

Upgrading from qCoder 0.6.0a18

Install qCoder 0.6.0a22 for a new installation or before starting a new Current Loop. If qCoder 0.6.0a18 already has an active Current Loop, upgrade only at a clean Current Loop boundary: before a new loop begins or after the current loop has reached a truthful terminal boundary.

Do not upgrade while any binding v44 / Current Step Contract v10 step, completion, continuation capsule, pending receipt, or recovery action remains outstanding. Finish the outstanding step on qCoder 0.6.0a18, or explicitly abandon it and restart the work under qCoder 0.6.0a22 at a clean boundary.

qCoder does not support or claim mid-step migration from binding v44 / Current Step Contract v10 to binding v45 / Current Step Contract v11. A v44/v10 operation receipt, authority grant, completion input, continuation capsule, or pending step must not be reused or reinterpreted under v45/v11. Project evidence history may remain; this boundary applies to the active step.

This release makes no latency, speed, p95, responsiveness, overhead, quiet-operation, or consistency guarantee; does not establish universal framework neutrality, general framework qualification, or general PennyLane qualification; and does not activate Tested, First-class, Client Compatibility, CL-023, named-client support, website, or marketing claims. Publication, deployment, qualification evidence, public applicability, and support claims remain separate lifecycle and product decisions.

qcoder is a local, deterministic quantum circuit evidence CLI.

The current public local path is qCoder OSS. OSS commands run locally and do not call hosted services, upload telemetry, or run QPU/simulator jobs.

Public CLI surface

• qcoder analyze
• qcoder batch
• qcoder context
• qcoder review (including the local selected-evidence journey)
• qcoder blueprint (machine-local selected-source evidence)
• qcoder current-loop (explicit assistant-driven coordination for one current IDE build)
• qcoder explorer (Explorer Beta account-backed status/demo/evidence checks)
• qcoder context-bridge (token-backed Context Bridge MCP adapter for eligible Explorer users)
• qcoder student (temporary compatibility alias for Explorer Beta)
• qcoder pro (archived pilot/bootstrap client contract; non-confidential local plumbing only, not a current public product path)

Current product boundaries

qCoder combines OSS local commands, Explorer compatibility commands, and the Context Bridge adapter for eligible Explorer users. Pro is not launched and is not a current public product path.

• OSS commands (analyze, batch, context, review) are Apache-2.0, local-first/offline, and useful without an account or token. They do not upload data, call a qCoder hosted service, or run QPU/simulator jobs.
• Explorer Beta commands (qcoder explorer status, qcoder explorer demo, qcoder explorer evidence) are account-backed checks for Explorer Beta status, built-in guided evidence samples, and derived-context guided evidence for user-owned OpenQASM 2 artifacts. The older qcoder student ... commands remain available as beta compatibility aliases.
• Context Bridge adapter commands (qcoder context-bridge mcp serve, qcoder context-bridge mcp smoke) are for eligible Explorer users who create a display-once token through Account Center. Support handles revocation and lost-token replacement. The adapter exposes bounded current-evidence context tools to a configured connected client and reads the token from a local token file. Client qualification is separate from connection or tool discovery.
• Explorer Beta custom evidence uses locally derived qCoder context/features. The CLI may read QASM locally, but the hosted request must not include raw QASM, raw source text, local paths, operation lists, raw counts, notebooks, prompts, tokens, auth headers, or cookies.
• Explorer Beta custom evidence is stateless in this v0 slice; it does not create persistent Explorer history.
• qcoder pro bootstrap/workflow commands are archived pilot/client-contract surfaces. They are not a Pro purchase path, not a current public signup path, and not generally available hosted Pro.
• There is no generally available production hosted Pro service, Pro account/token issuance, artifact/source upload, telemetry/training ingest, confidential local analyzer/cards, QPU/provider execution, or launched Pro V0.0 behavior in this public-main surface.
• No confidential Pro analysis or cards are bundled in this package. Token-gating is access control only, not a secrecy boundary.

Explorer Context Loop

The complete IDE-first loop is:

Human Intent → AI-Generated Python → Logical Circuit / QASM → Run Results → Evidence-Grounded Next Intent

The user and a connected assistant work through the IDE. The local SDK constructs the circuit. A simulator, runtime, or QPU produces results only through an externally authorized run. qCoder reviews bounded evidence from explicitly selected or supplied artifacts, and the user decides what should govern the next iteration. qCoder does not independently generate the Python, construct or compile the circuit, execute the run, recover hidden intent, prove correctness, or automatically adopt a blueprint decision.

The everyday path uses Assist: the customer explicitly activates qCoder for one build, the Current Loop Contract governs exact authorized output collection and local derivation, and qCoder surfaces material decisions or separate authority boundaries. Adaptive generation is the default; Blueprint-required governance is available. Evidence revisions, snapshots, and current or prior Run Summaries are bounded to that active loop and are purged on close. The optional local contract editor uses the same canonical contract as the IDE. Narrowing applies immediately; broadening requires explicit confirmation.

Finish or restart an active qCoder loop before upgrading. The version boundary fails closed instead of silently reinterpreting old authority data.

Version 0.6.0a21 preserves qCoder 0.6.0a20's routine source terminal-closure behavior under binding v45. Plain 0.6.0a19 remains intentionally reserved. Plain 0.6.0a20 remains immutable, unpublished, technically qualified, publication-truth rejected, terminal, and do-not-publish. Package publication does not activate a named-client support, compatibility, or performance claim.

Version 0.6.0a18 gives Algorithm Intent clarification recovery one atomic qCoder-supplied copy-through capsule under binding v44. qCoder 0.6.0a18 is a behavior-changing pre-release successor to public 0.6.0a16. Package publication does not activate a named-client support claim. Plain 0.6.0a17 remains immutable historical failure evidence; its release candidate was rejected and must not be published.

The successor preserves the connected-assistant, adaptive-intent input, coordinator-result, and vocabulary contracts while retaining a17's causal currentness, strict result-manifest lineage, and exact selected-path transport. This is a local active-loop compatibility boundary, not a migration of project history or server-side persistence.

The preserved a17 implementation corrected the a16 mixed-revision limitation. Replacing current source or circuit evidence invalidates dependent downstream currentness while preserving immutable history. Current result evidence requires a structured manifest with sufficient causal lineage; bare counts fail closed, and unknown-lineage manifests remain historical and non-current. Exact customer-selected paths are transported structurally without repository discovery, and recovery of an already-run pending completion does not authorize another execution.

Connected-client qualification

This package does not activate a named-client support claim. Qualification applies only to an exact scenario, delivery-environment profile, workstyle, and qCoder artifact. Connection, MCP tool discovery, or evidence for a related client does not establish qualification. One-call help and direct contract or completion routes do not add persistent memory, project history, repository discovery, or automatic IDE authority.

For a customer-selected named qCoder workflow, canonical preparatory states are non-terminal. The connected assistant continues only the already-selected workflow until the named customer outcome is ready, qCoder reports a genuine blocker, or qCoder reaches a real customer authority or decision boundary. For Evidence Review, assistant_context_ready is preparatory; result_review_context_card_ready is the customer outcome. The assistant must not infer customer authority, broaden artifact selection, discover files, or chain an unrelated qCoder capability. Canonical structured process_and_discard unambiguously means that no customer artifact is retained for that operation; qualification evidence remains fail-closed when this semantic state is absent, ambiguous, contradictory, free-form only, or belongs to another operation. For Algorithm Intent clarification, qCoder returns one atomic continuation capsule bound to the exact card, revision, and regenerated internal contract. The assistant copies the capsule unchanged and may submit only all advertised customer-reviewed unresolved fields plus the explicit review assertion. Malformed, tampered, stale, cross-card, cross-revision, incomplete, forbidden, and unauthorized continuations fail closed without raw-value echo or retention.

Context Bridge inventory

qCoder preserves the existing eight Evidence Review operations and adds four Algorithm Blueprint operations, for exactly twelve Context Bridge capability tools:

• get_guided_evidence_context
• create_prompt_context
• create_evidence_context_pack
• create_context_session_card
• create_run_readiness_card
• create_result_review_context_card
• create_next_check_plan
• create_single_loop_evidence_diff
• create_algorithm_intent_card
• create_implementation_blueprint
• create_generation_context_pack
• create_source_blueprint_alignment_review

create_prompt_context supports explain, review, revise, troubleshoot, and plan_next_checks modes; omitting the mode preserves the default behavior. Context Bridge uses only evidence explicitly supplied for the current request, processes it without retaining artifacts, and does not scan repositories, edit files, execute circuits or next checks, keep history or memory, score correctness, or perform autonomous work.

Review current evidence

Review local evidence

qCoder 0.6.0a15 composes existing canonical qCoder evidence into one local, account-free review. It reads only the files named explicitly on the command line; it does not accept a directory, expand a glob, recurse, discover hidden files, follow Python imports, scan a workspace, start a watcher, or call a network service.

Discover the journey and review fixed public samples:

qcoder review local-evidence --help
qcoder review local-evidence examples/fixtures/local_evidence_bell.py
qcoder review local-evidence \
  examples/circuits/bell.qasm \
  examples/fixtures/bell_counts_qiskit.json \
  --out-json local-evidence.json \
  --out-md local-evidence.md
qcoder review local-evidence examples/circuits/bell.qasm --local-help

The report presents review scope, provenance, bounded QASM and circuit facts, Python-only motif evidence, the canonical factual Run Summary when supplied results are present, limitations, unsupported states, share-safe choices, and exact next actions. OpenQASM 2 evidence extraction is bounded. OpenQASM 3 is recognized but evidence extraction is not supported; it is never passed to the OpenQASM 2 parser or reported as a complete circuit.

No qCoder account, no qCoder token, no Explorer service, and no MCP connection are required. The local report does not establish IDE/client qualification. It creates no project memory or hidden persistence.

Ordinary terminal, JSON, and Markdown reports may contain customer filenames and paths and are intended for local inspection. Use --share-safe-json or --share-safe-md before sharing; share-safe defaults remove filenames, paths, and raw/private artifacts.

Create a derived-only share-safe export explicitly and inspect it before sharing:

qcoder review local-evidence examples/circuits/bell.qasm \
  --share-safe-json local-evidence.share-safe.json

Raw/private categories remain excluded by default. Each applicable category has its own explicit opt-in, such as --include-original-qasm, --include-source-excerpts, --include-raw-counts, --include-customer-filenames, or --include-customer-paths; there is no include-everything switch and no automatic transmission. On the currently proven POSIX-style path flow, dot-prefixed selected or resolved path segments are rejected, including hidden symlink targets. Windows hidden attributes and alternate data streams are not qualified. See docs/local-evidence-review.md for the complete commands and section meanings.

This section describes behavior present in qCoder 0.6.0a18. Package publication and public client- claim status remain separate facts governed outside the package documentation.

Explorer Evidence Review

Evidence Review is an Explorer capability for understanding what explicitly supplied current evidence supports, what remains unproven, what changed within one bounded workflow, and what the user may choose to check next. It uses the existing Context Bridge operations:

• before an external run, use create_run_readiness_card;
• for a compact user-provided result summary, use create_result_review_context_card;
• for two explicitly supplied points in one workflow, use create_single_loop_evidence_diff;
• for ordered user-controlled follow-up, use create_next_check_plan;
• for assistant handoff, use create_prompt_context with review, troubleshoot, or plan_next_checks.

Core Evidence Review output uses these provenance and evidence-status labels: Observed, User-provided, Inferred, Assumed, Not proven, and Suggested next check. They are not confidence percentages, assurance ratings, or correctness scores. “What the evidence supports” is a bounded interpretation, not independent verification. “What changed” is a descriptive comparison of explicit inputs, not history, causality, or multi-run analysis. Suggested checks remain user-controlled and are not executed by qCoder.

Local qCoder OSS commands provide deterministic local analysis and review artifacts. Circuit Workbench is the machine-local selected-evidence surface for explicitly supplied artifacts. Explorer Evidence Review supplies bounded current-session interpretation within the complete Explorer Context Loop; Context Bridge carries the operations into a configured connected client but does not own the workflow or retain lineage. ChatGPT uses a manual share-safe Prompt Context handoff and is not a connected Context Bridge client.

See the sanitized Evidence Review walkthrough.

Prepare an Algorithm Blueprint

Algorithm Blueprint is an Explorer capability for turning explicitly supplied human intent into a reviewable, user-confirmed Qiskit-first build contract before code generation, then reviewing compact static Python evidence against that contract. The current workflow uses:

• create_algorithm_intent_card to preserve original intent, provenance, clarification questions, and explicit user-reviewed confirmation;
• create_implementation_blueprint to return an Implementation Blueprint and a distinct Output Evidence Contract without adding another tool;
• create_generation_context_pack to prepare requirements for an external, user-selected code generation assistant or a manual handoff;
• external, user-controlled Python generation outside qCoder;
• qcoder blueprint source-evidence for deterministic machine-local AST extraction from one selected .py file or bounded stdin; and
• create_source_blueprint_alignment_review to review only compact supplied static evidence.

The available profiles are Generic Qiskit Blueprint, Grover Search, and QAOA. Profiles ask deterministic questions and surface alternatives; they do not silently choose an oracle, QAOA depth, mixer, optimizer, backend, shots, or parameter strategy. Static motif observations do not prove algorithm identity, correctness, completeness, executability, or runtime behavior. qCoder does not scan a repository, import or execute selected source, generate code, edit files, invoke a simulator/backend/QPU, retain artifacts, or retrieve prior artifacts.

See the synthetic Algorithm Blueprint walkthrough.

Quick start

qCoder 0.6.0a22 is a pre-release. It is not a stable or generally available release. Package publication and named-client support claims are governed separately. The commands below describe behavior present in this pre-release; public qCoder 0.6.0a18 remains the public upgrade predecessor, plain a17 remains a rejected immutable candidate, and terminal plain a20 and a21 are not publication targets.

Analyze a circuit:

qcoder analyze path/to/circuit.qasm --json

Create local context and review artifacts:

qcoder context path/to/circuit.qasm --out-json preflight.context.json --out-md preflight.context.md
qcoder review --counts-json counts.json --format qiskit_counts --preflight-json preflight.context.json --out-json execution.review.json --out-md execution.review.md
qcoder blueprint source-evidence --source-file selected_generated.py

Or use the coherent local selected-evidence journey:

qcoder review local-evidence path/to/selected.py path/to/circuit.qasm path/to/counts.json

For artifacts you intend to paste into ChatGPT, Cursor, email, GitHub issues, or support threads, add --share-safe:

qcoder analyze path/to/circuit.qasm --json --share-safe
qcoder context path/to/circuit.qasm --out-json preflight.context.json --out-md preflight.context.md --share-safe
qcoder review --counts-json counts.json --format qiskit_counts --preflight-json preflight.context.json --out-json execution.review.json --out-md execution.review.md --share-safe

Share-safe mode is designed for safer sharing: it redacts local paths and token/header-like strings, adds share_safe=true, and marks raw QASM/local paths/tokens as not included. Review artifacts before sharing; this is not a guarantee that all sensitive project content has been removed.

Explorer Beta compatibility checks and archived Pro bootstrap:

qcoder explorer status
qcoder explorer demo
qcoder explorer evidence
qcoder explorer evidence --qasm path/to/circuit.qasm
qcoder explorer evidence --context-json preflight.context.json
qcoder explorer evidence --qasm path/to/circuit.qasm --out-json explorer.json --out-md explorer.md --share-safe
python -m qcoder context-bridge mcp serve --help
python -m qcoder context-bridge mcp smoke --token-file ~/.qcoder/context-bridge/token.txt
python -m qcoder current-loop --help
qcoder pro --help

Run the Context Bridge commands in the Python environment where qCoder is installed. The default smoke prints a concise connection result. Add --json for structured troubleshooting, or --full for the exhaustive support/release diagnostic; full mode stops without automatic retry when the current rate window requires a pause.

Connected clients receive an explicit opt-in Current Loop instruction from the local Context Bridge server. The instruction activates only after the customer asks to use qCoder or accepts an offer, uses the same configured Python runtime to invoke qcoder current-loop, and keeps IDE write/run permission and exact-artifact review permission separate. It never contains the Context Bridge token.

Support-safe checklist

Safe to share with QRS support:

• qcoder --version
• command name
• HTTP status or CLI error code
• job_id, if produced
• redacted output
• manifest schema/version

Do not share:

• bearer tokens
• secrets
• source code
• repository archives
• notebooks
• private prompts or chat transcripts
• raw QASM/source artifacts through unsupported paths

Architecture notes: docs/architecture.md.

Optional extras

pip install "qcoder[qiskit]"
pip install "qcoder[cirq]"
pip install "qcoder[pennylane]"

License

Apache-2.0 (see LICENSE and NOTICE).