Every newer release
Each release past the pin, marked inside or outside the declared range, with its date, its link and its notes whole, as upstream wrote them. No model reads the notes inside headwater.
headwater is designed, not built. Its design book holds the design whole.
headwater
headwater tells your repository which releases of what it depends on are newer than what it runs, in upstream’s own words.
headwater reads what a repository declares, asks each ecosystem’s package manager first, in the repository’s own shell, and reports every release newer than the pin. The pin alone decides what is new, so headwater keeps no list of what it reported: when a bump lands, the pin moves and the release leaves the report.
The roadmap orders the work of building it.
What a report holds
Section titled “What a report holds”Advisories that name the pin
Reported apart from the notes. A dependency an advisory names stays marked affected, whatever anyone dismissed.
What it could not read
A declaration headwater cannot read, or a source it cannot reach, is reported unread with the reason. Nothing drops out of a report.
A brief for each release
Everything a fixer needs to make the bump: the release, its notes, its advisories, every declaration of the dependency with its pin, and the ecosystem’s own command for the move.
What it never does
Section titled “What it never does”headwater never changes a repository, never rewords or ranks a release, and never acts on one. It runs a package manager only to read, and never runs the command that moves a pin. A person or a coding agent decides whether to move it, and the change is theirs. A lookup learns the identities and versions headwater asks about and nothing else of the repository, and headwater keeps no credential.
Where you meet it
Section titled “Where you meet it”One core answers every surface the same way, so a person at the command line, an agent in its session and a pane beside the agents all see one report.
Command line
A scan, a report, a brief for one release, and every answer as JSON on request.
Claude Code
New releases noted at a session’s start, and a release handed to a background agent in a worktree of its own.
herdr
A sidebar row of unread releases, a popup with the brief, and a key that starts an agent in a worktree to make the bump and submit it to sluice.
Flywheel
An adapter that hands every release newer than its pin to millpond, the inbox, which records each one once. How it fits.
Its first user
Section titled “Its first user”swancloud, a NixOS fleet, runs headwater first. Its watch list, generated from the versions the fleet pins, names each tool’s upstream repository and tag pattern, and headwater takes over from the release adapter the fleet runs today.