• AI request resilience: transient AI failures no longer kill an in-flight report or interview generation. A new ResilientAIService decorator wraps every provider (Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama) and retries on 429 rate-limits and 502/503/504 gateway errors with exponential backoff (3 attempts, ±25% jitter, honoring the Retry-After header when Anthropic sends one). Streaming retries are pre-yield only — once any chunk has been emitted to the consumer the partial response is preserved and the error propagates. Typed AIException subtypes (AIRateLimitException, AIServerException, AINetworkException, AITimeoutException, AICancelledException, AIClientException) replace bare DioExceptions so the UI can render actionable, classified failure copy.
• Stop button for in-flight AI calls: the Generate, Revise, and Report screens each render a Stop affordance while an AI call is running. The cancellation flows through Dio's CancelToken on AIRequest; the writer↔reviewer loops also check the token between turns so they exit cleanly without committing a partial draft. Stopped generations surface a neutral "Generation stopped" snackbar rather than an error banner.
• Per-call AI timeouts: a new AITimeouts class centralises the connect (10s), send (30s), blocking-receive (60s), and streaming-receive (3min) defaults applied to every provider's Dio client. Streaming endpoints override the receive timeout per request via AITimeouts.streamingRequestOptions(). Tuned in one place — not surfaced in Settings.
• Branded dark DMG installer background: dark #1A1A1A canvas with a dot-grid texture, red left-edge accent stripe, faint oversized "R" watermark, corner brackets, and "RUBRIC" wordmark. Generated by app/scripts/generate_dmg_background.py (Pillow) and committed to app/assets/dmg/dmg_background.png. Regenerate at any time with make dmg-bg.
• Auto-update (macOS): the app now checks for new versions on launch and offers a one-click in-place install via Sparkle through the auto_updater plugin. A new Updates section in Settings exposes the "Check for updates automatically" toggle, a manual "Check now" button, and the timestamp of the last successful check; a standard Check for Updates… item also lives under the application menu. Releases are signed with an EdDSA key in CI and announced through a Sparkle appcast at /appcast.xml.

Changed

• AI failure messaging: snackbars on the Generate / Revise / Report screens now surface the typed AIException.userMessage (e.g. "AI provider is rate-limited — retry in 7s.", "AI authentication failed. Check your API key in Settings.") instead of a raw stack trace. The fallback "Generation failed: $e" path remains for unclassified errors.
• Release entitlements: the Release.entitlements no longer requests com.apple.security.app-sandbox. Rubric is distributed under Developer ID (not Mac App Store), and the hardened runtime + notarization are unchanged — dropping the sandbox lets Sparkle replace the running bundle without a custom XPC service.