Evidence record / gemini-cli
A dated record of one change, kept so the writing that cites it can be checked. Compiled from the sources listed below by the research run, not written for reading. The judgment lives in the issues that cite it, below.
2026-08-17-gemini-cli-the-preview-channel-is-not-ahead-of-stable-v0-56-0-preview-1-is-v0-55-1
The preview channel is not ahead of stable -- v0.56.0-preview.1 is v0.55.1 minus one fix.
v0.56.0-preview.1 was cut 2026-08-11T19:46Z, about 90 minutes before v0.55.1 stable at 21:15Z, from a point on the branch that predates #28688. As a result the 0.56 preview tree contains zero feature commits beyond stable and is missing one OAuth fix that stable has. Six days of main-branch work -- the git-environment hardening (#28792), the capacity-retry restoration (#28790), the multi-turn rollback (#28801), the IDE directory-mismatch fix (#28729), and all eleven merged SSR-agent PRs -- are in no preview tag either; git tag --contains on each returns empty.
Channel: preview-or-beta. Ancestry: git log v0.55.1..v0.56.0-preview.1 returns a single commit, 8f0576950 chore(release): v0.56.0-preview.1. The reverse, git log v0.56.0-preview.1..v0.55.1, returns two: the v0.55.1 release chore and 58ba19945 (#28688, Cloud Workstations OAuth redirect). git tag --contains 58ba19945 -> v0.55.1 only, not v0.56.0-preview.1. npm dist-tags: preview=0.56.0-preview.1, latest=0.55.1.
Operator consequence: Stop treating npm i -g @google/gemini-cli@preview as an early look at what is coming. For the 0.56 line as of 2026-08-17 it gives you strictly less than stable. If you canary against preview to catch regressions before they reach your users, that canary is currently blind: run your probes against the default branch instead, or wait for a preview cut that actually contains post-v0.55.1 commits.
Receipt
Finding metadata
Run: 2026-08-17-weekly-digest-2026-08-10_2026-08-17-frontier-v0
Finding ID: 2026-08-17-gemini-cli-the-preview-channel-is-not-ahead-of-stable-v0-56-0-preview-1-is-v0-55-1
Source links
Primary links, including exact changelog lines when available.
Versioned source: run artifact