What changed, and why

2026-08-27 · v0.54.0 · instrument 0.25.0-pilot · plain enough for a twelve year old, enforced by a test

Change (owner standard, permanent): Everything a person being assessed reads must be simple enough for a twelve year old. That is now a build gate, not a style preference: a new automated test scores every question, every help text in every voice, the client result page, the sample stories, and the participant section for reading grade, and fails the build above grade eight. Its first run found 67 strings over the line, some at college level: the question about total months homeless scored grade 12.7 and now reads "Think about the past three years. About how many months in all have you stayed outside, in an emergency shelter, or in a place not meant for people to live in?" at grade 5.7. Seventeen questions were rewritten in plain words with their meaning checked and preserved: no reassurance weakened, every 911 and 988 instruction intact, and each change recorded on the Evidence Register with its before and after score. Two words also became consistent everywhere: "outside" instead of "on the streets," matching the words the answer choices already used. Staff-facing and policy-facing text is deliberately not covered by this gate; it is allowed its precision.

2026-08-27 · v0.53.1 · instrument 0.24.0-pilot · a second door on the front page

Change (external review, second pass): The hero gained a quiet second button, "Explore a shadow pilot," jumping straight to the run-it-alongside section, since testing HEAT against an existing assessment is what a community can actually do today. The rest of the reviewer's second-pass asks turned out to already be live: the reviewed copy was a cached page from before the restructure, which is its own small argument for the caching note in the deploy checklist.

2026-08-27 · v0.53.0 · instrument 0.24.0-pilot · the front page answers the first question first

Change (external review of the new home, owner-directed): The landing page was reorganized so a person arriving cold understands HEAT in the first screen: what it is (housing assessment without the black box), what it produces (a real sample result card, generated from the same persona and the same engines as the live sample, held to the engine by a new test so it can never silently drift), how the boundary works (HEAT assesses; your community decides), why to trust it (deterministic, transparent, private, no black-box scoring), and how to try it without replacing anything (the shadow pilot, moved up). The section for people taking an assessment now asks its own question, "Are you taking a HEAT assessment?", and keeps every reassurance. Nothing honest left the site; the deeper material moved one layer down behind its links. Two stale numbers died in the process: the page claimed 193 automated tests while the suite had reached 328, and "26 to 28 questions" while the published samples are asked 26 to 30, so every number on the page is now computed from the instrument and the samples rather than typed, and a test fails the build if the page and the engines ever disagree.

2026-08-27 · v0.52.0 · instrument 0.24.0-pilot · a home of its own

Change (owner decision): HEAT moved to housingtriage.org, a domain that says what the instrument is: a structured housing triage assessment. The former address, heat.gaitherdyn.com, and the companion domains heatassessment.org and heattriage.org now forward here permanently, so every existing link keeps working. Nothing about the instrument, the rules, or your answers changed with the address; the visit counter carries over uninterrupted, and feedback, sample results, and the register all live at the same paths on the new home. One practical reason for the move, recorded honestly: an unrelated Oregon assessment also abbreviates to HEAT, and an address built on the category name rather than the acronym keeps the two from being confused when a link is read aloud.

2026-08-11 · v0.51.0 · instrument 0.24.0-pilot · the assumption is fully gone, and the engine keeps its own promises

Change (finishing the presupposition work): The last two places that assumed a current street period are fixed. The before-homelessness question now asks everyone where they stayed just before where they are now, in words that work for a family on a relative's couch and for a person leaving a facility alike; it stays asked of everyone because the engines provably read it for discharge and support planning (gating it would have deleted transition support and medical respite for the paradigm discharge case, demonstrated by a committed counterfactual test). Every line of result prose that said "entered this period" now describes the person's actual situation, and the client page finally has honest words for someone in their own housing instead of calling it a housing crisis. One false claim was corrected: the question's help text said the chronic homelessness arithmetic reads this answer, and it does not; the help now names only what actually reads it. Deeper still, the engine now cleans its own input: answers to questions that were never asked are removed by the engine itself rather than by trusting each app to do it, proven across a 1,440-session sweep where every well-formed session came out byte-identical and only sessions carrying impossible answers changed, each to the honest result for a question never asked. 328 automated tests; six adversarial reverts, all caught.

2026-08-11 · v0.50.0 · instrument 0.23.0-pilot · the timeline questions stop assuming everyone is on the street tonight

Change (owner ruling: a verified problem with a known solution gets fixed): The three homelessness-timeline questions assumed a current street or shelter period and asked everyone anyway, so a family doubled up with relatives was asked when "this current period of staying on the streets" began. People staying with family or friends, or in their own housing, now get past-tense versions that say plainly that 0 is an ordinary answer, and the start-date question is simply not asked of them unless they report at least one past period; a question that cannot apply is not asked, and skipping it never counts against anyone. People on the street, in shelter, or leaving a facility see exactly what they saw before, proven byte-identical across 525 generated sessions. Two quiet falsehoods died with the assumption: housed respondents no longer get a continuous-months arithmetic line for a pathway that cannot apply to them, and no longer get told their answers conflict when a remembered period was shorter than the time since it started. The family sample was corrected to answers that fit the questions' own definitions, and a new automated suite holds all four samples to every consistency guard so a sample can never contradict the instrument again. 316 automated tests, up from 265, including nine adversarial reverts all caught by the suite.

2026-08-11 · v0.49.0 · instrument 0.22.0-pilot · the answers must fit each other, and a 16-year-old is not an adult

Change (owner direction: fix anything illogical, and test): A full audit of every answer combination. Three new consistency guards join the five that existed: the number of separate times homeless and the total months can no longer disagree about whether there was any period at all; months since a permanent place cannot exceed how long the person has been alive; and a start date cannot land before their birth. Guards stay message-only: they catch mistakes at the moment of entry, in plain words, in the right voice for who is answering, and a new test renders every guard message in every mode so an unvoiced guard fails the build. The deepest fix: the adults-in-household question told a 16-year-old to count themselves as an adult and would not accept zero; people under 18 now get wording that does not count them, accepts zero, and, on the children question, says plainly that some people under 18 are parents and both answers are ordinary. One stale-answer leak was fixed (an eviction line could survive an age edit that removed the question), the answer-pruning rule moved into the engine where every consumer gets it, over-limit numbers now hear the real limit instead of a false complaint about digits, and future start dates were already rejected but are now pinned by tests. Eleven of the fixes were verified adversarially: each was reverted one at a time and the test suite caught every single one. 265 automated tests, up from 214.

2026-08-11 · v0.48.0 · instrument 0.21.0-pilot · nine register proposals decided, five held for pilot evidence

Change (owner rulings on the practitioner review round; credit Elisa and the review group): The questions about who the person is (age, adults, children, children staying elsewhere) moved near the beginning and the age question now says plainly it is about the person being assessed, because two practitioners independently answered it thinking it was about the children. The long-lasting-condition question now sits directly before the daily-help question. A new automated test proves the reorder changed no determination: identical answers produce byte-identical results in any question order. Two optional, unscored follow-ups were added: when the stable place was (so "when I was a kid" has somewhere honest to go without narrowing the question), and what kinds of help would make housing easier to keep (a conversation starter that prints for the case manager and is never scored, never required, and stated plainly to not be a disability assessment). The children-elsewhere help was reworded plainly. The before-homelessness and three-timeline questions now explain themselves (an earlier shelter stay can be the right answer; HUD's chronic homelessness definition is arithmetic over all three timeline answers). The overdose-question rewording was declined with reasons on the register, its humane concern already shipped. The most anyone is ever asked is now 36 questions.

Held open on purpose: the five proposals that would change what a rule reads (smoke sensitivity, the suicide-question window, eviction court history, requiring the safe place to be reachable, and the emergency-room anchor) stay open on the register for votes, comments, and pilot evidence.

2026-08-10 · v0.47.0 · instrument 0.20.0-pilot · the page says what it is for, and cites only law that still stands

Change (flag from Elisa, plus queue work): The result page stopped speaking staff shorthand: "drawer" and "trigger fires" are gone from anything a person reads, replaced with plain sections and plain sentences. The client page now says outright that it is about the answers just given, on this date, and that nothing was saved or sent; and both views offer an optional write-in name or reference that prints on the page and is never stored or transmitted, so a handed-over page can be tied to a household without the tool collecting anyone's identity. A paragraph that addressed the worker even on the client's own page now speaks to the person it is about. Answering for someone not present now keeps third-person wording all the way through the result page, with the voice test extended to cover it. Every "call 911" became "dial 911", matching the banner. And the pet-letter question's evidence no longer cites HUD assistance-animal guidance FHEO-2020-01, which HUD withdrew on 2025-09-17: the entry now rests on the Fair Housing Act and Section 504 themselves, and says plainly that the statutory duty is unchanged while documentation practice is unsettled. Question ordering, which Elisa also raised, stays with the open register proposal rather than being decided here.

2026-08-10 · v0.46.0 · instrument 0.19.0-pilot · one reviewer found the same bug six times, and now a test owns it

Change (18 practitioner flags, most from Elisa, 25 years in the field): Six of her flags were one defect: when answering for someone who is not present, question stems switched to "they" but help text, some answer choices, and a range hint stayed in "you" and "me", so every proxy assessment mixed voices on most screens. Every item now carries matching variants for every mode, a new automated test reconstructs what each mode actually renders and fails on any voice mix or on help that names an assessor in self-administered mode, and a quiet line under the progress bar now says on every question screen who is answering for whom, since she proved the questions did not explain that by themselves. Also adopted from her flags: the fleeing-violence help no longer says "violence at home" to people without homes (it now names violence in a relationship or from family or household members, no matter where you are staying); "a place not meant for people to live in" gives concrete examples (car or van, shed, garage, storage unit, abandoned building, park, bus or train station); adults is defined as 18 or older; the age question says whose age it wants; the pet question includes more than one animal; and the pet-letter help explains that any licensed health professional who treats you can write the letter, with new glossary entries on service animals versus emotional support animals. 25 item versions bumped; every change is recorded on the Evidence Register.

Sent to the register for vetting (not obvious enough to decide alone): whether the stay-with-someone place must be reachable, question ordering (grouping who-the-person-is questions, pairing the condition and daily-help questions), why the before-homelessness question offers homeless answers, why the timeline is asked three ways, the children-elsewhere reword, and whether anchoring a question on emergency room visits undercounts people who avoid emergency rooms. Her request for a time anchor on the stable-place question joined the existing open proposal on that item as an addendum.

2026-08-07 · v0.45.0 · instrument 0.18.0-pilot · three reviewers, twelve fixes

Change (structured review: a HUD technical assistance reader, a case manager mid-shift, and a person being assessed): For the TA reader: Governance now states where the line is (HEAT documents and explains; prioritization belongs to the CoC's written standards, and HEAT never ranks), names the three administration modes, and every page now carries the beta status, not just the front door. For the case manager: printing is fixed (dark mode printed zones black on near-black and checkboxes as solid squares; print now forces a light palette in every theme), the check-your-answers screen groups by phase and writes dates as words, cited sources print their web addresses, and the client handout finally says what it is, with date, how it was completed, and version. For the person being assessed: the front page speaks to them directly (answers stay on this device unless you choose otherwise, you can skip anything, nothing is scored, what you leave with), the intro says how long it takes with numbers read from the instrument itself, the client page grew a proper heading so screen readers land somewhere, and one leftover piece of staff jargon on the client page was replaced with plain words. Question wording, rules, and the open register proposals were deliberately not touched; larger findings from the same review are queued for decisions.

2026-08-07 · v0.44.0 · instrument 0.18.0-pilot · the register stops promising what has not happened

Change (owner decisions): Two honesty fixes on the Evidence Register (register v1.7.0). The introduction promised to show "who has reviewed it" while every entry read pending external review; it now says where each entry stands and states plainly that external review has not started yet. And three entries still called a question group by its old name, "Service history"; they now use the current name, Adult context, with the rename noted where the old name appears in dated history. Also decided: the six practitioner proposals stay open on the register for public vetting rather than being decided immediately, and the footer keeps its current order.

2026-08-07 · v0.43.0 · instrument 0.18.0-pilot · the register speaks plainly, the group review is fully filed

Change (owner direction): The register's voting buttons no longer assume you know what an arrow means: they now say "Adopt this change" and "Do not adopt this change", with the count beside each and a note that recording a vote can be taken back. The page also explains itself: how a proposal gets here, what a vote does (it informs the decision, it is not a ballot; every adoption still passes the published tests and change control), and what is kept about you. Every proposal now shows a change-control classification chip naming how carefully that kind of change has to be made, from wording-only through logic change.

Also (practitioner group review, all seven flags resolved): The six proposals from the 2026-08-04 group session were already on the register for vetting; each now carries its change-control classification, and the overdose-question proposal was completed with the two parts the first write-up dropped, including a plain refusal to ever ask whether someone is seeking treatment: readiness can never become a disguised test. The seventh flag suggested a published framework on supporting people between visits; it is recorded in the project's research notes for the follow-through work already queued, since it proposes no change to any question. Icons spread where they help scanning: question groups share a mark with their jump-menu pill, evidence entries show a sensitivity meter, register statuses and result-card sections got marks. Two defects found on the way are fixed: the shipped assessment bundle was one commit stale and still carried an em-dash, and the em-dash gate could not see into scripts; it now reads them and catches escaped forms.

2026-08-03 · v0.42.0 · instrument 0.18.0-pilot · two honest answers added to the "where were you staying" question

Change (owner flag #138, "missing option"): The question about where someone was staying just before this period of homelessness gains two answers: "An emergency shelter or transitional housing program" and "A car, tent, or outside". Both situations previously had no honest answer except "Somewhere else", which erased the two most operationally distinct pathways: moving between shelters, and arriving from unsheltered homelessness. The split follows the HMIS Prior Living Situation categories. Deliberately not added: a "fleeing violence or abuse" answer. Following HMIS practice, safety screening belongs in its own carefully designed question, not inside a list where a disclosure could be seen over someone's shoulder; the register records this reasoning. The new answers change no scores: no rule keys on them until evidence supports one. Evidence register 1.6.0.

2026-08-02 · v0.41.0 · instrument 0.17.0-pilot · the site now reports its own errors

Change (network monitoring): Every page now loads a small error-monitoring script (Sentry), the same one the rest of the network runs, so that a broken page reports itself instead of waiting for someone to notice. It records JavaScript errors only: no session replay anywhere on this site, because a replay of an assessment could capture a vulnerable person's answers, the same reasoning that already keeps session recording off the assessment screen. Visitors who send the Global Privacy Control signal are not monitored at all. Noise from browser extensions and from third-party analytics scripts is filtered out so the record stays about this site's own code.

2026-08-01 · v0.40.0 · instrument 0.17.0-pilot · deadly heat counts like deadly cold, and definitions cite their sources

Change (owner flag): The instrument asked whether cold had ever put someone in medical care, and never asked about heat. It does now: a new question covers heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and dehydration from having no way out of the heat, worded and scoped exactly like its cold counterpart. It raises the support planning level only (new rule SN-R11, floor high, same as every mortality-event answer), never gates any option, and carries its own Evidence Register entry. The evidence tier is stated honestly: heat-death surveillance rather than the cohort study behind the cold question. The core is now 24 questions, the published samples are asked 26 to 28, and the hard cap is 34.

Also (owner flag): The definitions that pop up on dotted-underline terms now cite their sources: each term with an authoritative public document links to it, on hud.gov, the HUD Exchange, the Federal Register, the eCFR, va.gov, ed.gov, or usa.gov. Every link was checked before shipping; terms without a verifiable primary source carry no link rather than a guessed one. On the case manager page, the statement that getting an available bed never waits for prioritization now cites the HUD notice that says so, CPD-17-01.

2026-07-31 · v0.39.0 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · navigation that tells the truth, sections that explain themselves

Change (owner catches, all shipped same day): The navigation marked "Assessment" as the current page while a sample was on screen; the marker now follows what is actually being viewed, verified across deep links, persona switches, and hash changes. The Questions page gained a jump menu to every question group, and each group now states who is asked it and why, derived from the instrument's real skip logic rather than written from memory (two draft descriptions were corrected against the actual gates before publishing). The navigation links gained icons. And the emergency banner at the top of the page had drifted into two different wordings on different pages, so all shared page chrome (banner, navigation, footer links, scripts) was unified and is now compared byte-for-byte across every page by the build gate, which fails on any future drift.

Also (accuracy sweep): A synchronization audit corrected stale claims that had outlived the releases that made them: an old automated-test count, an understated typical question count (the published samples are asked 25 to 28), a changelog introduction that promised more than every entry delivers, and a Governance description of disagreement that omitted the in-tool route that has existed since v0.36.0. Governance now links to the full question list where it cites the question cap.

2026-07-31 · v0.38.0 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · one rail, one measure

Change (owner review of the width work): The layout system had three competing widths: a text cap, a centered column, and the page container, which produced two left edges on one page, dead space to the right of paragraphs, and holes between cards of different heights. All three collapsed into one rail and one measure: every heading, paragraph, and grid on a page now starts at the same left edge, body text runs to a single fixed measure so every paragraph ends on the same right edge, and cards in a row share a height with their answer choices resting on the card floor. The automated alignment audit gained two matching checks, one for multiple left rails and one for dead zones beside text, which found 87 violations before the fix and zero after. Smaller catches from the same visual pass: a stray focus box around page titles, drawer arrows that fell off their row, and callout bands that stopped short of the card edge.

Also (owner ruling): The "Review board: open seats" section is removed from Governance. A standing review board may return later as a deliberate decision; it is not being recruited now. Anyone interested in the tool can book a virtual meeting through the site's regular links.

2026-07-31 · v0.37.0 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · navigation, width, and one alignment rule

Change (owner direction across three rounds): Every page now carries a navigation row: Home, Assessment, Samples, Questions, Evidence, Governance, Changelog, with the current page marked, so no page is a dead end that must be left through the front door. The long reading pages stopped being narrow columns inside a wide site: the Questions page became a two-column grid of question cards, the Evidence Register a two-column grid of entry cards, Governance's two defended statements sit side by side, and the reading column widened. And alignment became one enforced rule instead of case-by-case fixes: within any card, everything shares one flow, left by default, with exactly two deliberately centered groups on the whole site (the end-of-page actions and the sample banner). A new automated audit script walks every page and view and fails on any container that mixes centered and left content; its first run found eight violations in five cards at once, all the same mistake, all fixed the same way. It now runs before any interface release.

2026-07-31 · v0.36.0 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · designed for its width

Change (owner direction: "is this how you would design it out the gate at this width?"): No, it was not, so the page system was rebuilt around one rule with two behaviors: prose lives in a centered column with balanced margins on both sides (text stays left-aligned; the column is what centers), and structure, meaning card grids, checklists, drawers, and the sample switcher, spans the full width. The landing hero, every section introduction, and the governance and questions pages now sit on that centered rail; the six-point list is a clean two-column grid instead of accidental ragged columns; the For-CoCs principles sit two by two; and the sample banner reads as one centered story instead of left text over a centered button. Phones are byte-identical to before.

Also (owner catch, no dead ends): the disagree-with-a-result section, when no community contact is configured, used to say "ask any housing help office how to start one," an instruction with no path. It now routes through the tool itself: change any answer and the result recomputes, record what the rules missed in the Assessor judgment box and flag it for case conference, or press the report button, which opens the built-in feedback channel straight to the review queue.

2026-07-31 · v0.35.1 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · icons and balance

Change (owner direction, screenshot-reviewed): Icons reached the page chrome: the theme choices now show a monitor, a sun, and a moon; colorblind mode shows an eye; the Feedback button carries a real flag instead of a text glyph; and Leave quickly carries an exit mark, identical wherever that escape appears. On wide screens the results page stopped hugging the left edge: action buttons are centered in their card, the assessment section became three readable cards side by side instead of stacked paragraphs, and the client page's three zones now sit in parallel. Body prose stays left-aligned and capped at a readable width, because centered paragraphs help nobody. Print still gets the stacked original, phones are unchanged to the pixel, and every header control kept its label and its full touch size.

2026-07-31 · v0.35.0 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · viewability round

Change (owner direction): The site got wider and shorter. The container grew from 920 to 1160 pixels so reading pages use the screen, while anything a person fills in stays a narrow readable column, and running prose is capped at a readable measure so wide windows never produce endless lines. The sample page now opens with an example already showing (the long-term homelessness case) and four horizontal switcher pills, each with its own icon, jump between the personas; the separate chooser page is gone. The persona mix was corrected on the owner's field point that assessment mostly happens through street outreach and access points: the veteran now sleeps in their car (a vehicle is a place not meant for people to live in), the young adult is assessed by staff in a youth shelter, and only one persona of four is in emergency shelter. New icons throughout: an hourglass for long-term homelessness, a star for the veteran household, a seedling for the young adult, an adult-and-child for the family, and the client-page zone marks became real icons instead of typographic symbols. Verified at desktop, tablet, and phone widths with zero overflow on every page.

2026-07-30 · v0.34.0 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · four sample results

Change (owner request): The single sample result became four, each a made-up person run through the real engines, chosen to show how HEAT distinguishes rather than just what it produces: long-term homelessness (meets the chronic definition, intensive support planning, PSH discussed first); a veteran household that is NOT chronic (a veteran does not need to be chronic to reach veteran-specific doors: SSVF serves the family, rapid re-housing leads the discussion); a young adult (18 to 24, first time, a possible safe place to stay tonight, so diversion leads); and a family doubled up and about to lose their housing (possibly Category 2, prevention and diversion emphasized, and the McKinney-Vento school-rights note for the children). A chooser at /assessment#sample describes all four; each has its own link and a switcher to jump between them. Every number and reasoning step in all four is computed live by the same engines that run a real assessment.

2026-07-30 · v0.33.1 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · deep review complete

Change: The owner-commissioned deep review concluded. Its final deliverable, an Improvement Register, now lives in the repository as the single source of truth for open work: 23 candidate improvements, each classified under the adopted change-control taxonomy (wording-only through logic-change, where logic changes require a ten-part justification including rollback conditions), prioritized as pre-pilot, during-pilot, post-validation, or future-state, and 13 recorded non-recommendations with reasons, from the numeric composite score rejected on day one to ideas rejected this week with citations. The review's verdict across seven additional fields of practice, from child welfare to humanitarian allocation: HEAT's separation of safety, need, eligibility, and discussion is the converged design of every mature system examined, and the fields that collapsed those concepts produced the worst outcomes. What was uncertain is now either built, queued with a plan, or rejected with a paper trail.

2026-07-30 · v0.33.0 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot · uncertainty and judgment round

Change (from the cross-field research review): Missing information now says which kind of missing it is, using the vocabulary adult protective services uses nationally: "chose not to answer," "did not know," "not asked," and "answers conflict" are now distinguished everywhere missing answers are reported, and every surface that mentions a declined answer carries the reassurance that declining never counts against the person. Nothing changed in any rule: every kind of missing is still just missing to the engines, and none can lower a result. And the case-manager view gained an "Assessor judgment" card: when professional judgment sees something the rules did not capture, the assessor picks a reason from a fixed list (safety concern not covered, health concern not captured, situation changed, observation conflicts with an answer, or other), describes it in their own words, and can flag the case for conference review. It prints with the record, changes no determination, is never saved or transmitted, and does not appear when someone assesses themselves. How often it is used becomes a pilot measurement, compared against the only published norm for structured-tool overrides, the 5 to 10 percent band from child welfare.

Also: the validation plan now states plainly what a small shadow pilot can measure and what it cannot: no predictive-validity claims, no disparity statistics from tiny subgroups, and no before-and-after service-use claims at all, because regression to the mean makes them uninterpretable, a lesson the complex-care field learned by randomized trial.

2026-07-30 · v0.32.1 · instrument 0.16.0-pilot

Change (owner ruling from the under-18 audit): The eviction question joined the military question behind the adult gate. Minors generally cannot hold leases, which made "Is there an eviction case against you in court right now?" nearly unanswerable for an unaccompanied minor. The under-18 path is now two questions shorter than the adult path, and the reasoning is recorded in the Evidence Register.

2026-07-30 · v0.32.0 · instrument 0.15.0-pilot · pre-pilot fixes

Change (three owner-approved fixes from the HUD-guidance benchmark): First, minors are no longer asked the military question; HUD's own guidance uses exactly this skip-logic example, and the under-18 path is now one question shorter, never longer. One honest consequence, chosen deliberately: declining to give an age also skips the veteran question, so the veteran pathway requires an age band; this is logged for cognitive testing. Second, the assessment now shows its phase ("Question 4 of about 24 · Safety"), the someone-you-could-stay-with question moved to directly after the safety questions per HUD's phase order, and a yes answer now offers a real choice: "A possible option for tonight" lets the person stop the assessment there and try that option, with an explicit promise that stopping never affects their place in line, or continue. Diversion is a conversation, not a checkbox. Third, the disagree-with-a-result section now always appears: when no local contact is configured, it states the right every Continuum of Care must provide, and how to ask any housing help office to start a review.

Also noted from the same review: an audit of the remaining questions for under-18 appropriateness produced a short list for owner decisions before pilot (the eviction question, minor-consent law around the substance question, and youth-specific crisis follow-through), recorded internally.

2026-07-30 · v0.31.0 · instrument 0.14.0-pilot · action-plan round

Change (external review of the live product, mostly adopted): The result page now works like what it actually is: a housing action plan generated from a transparent assessment. "Do next" became "Today's housing action plan" with TODAY rendered as an unmissable chip; the raise-first order now carries its reason inline ("Raise PSH first: chronic homelessness appears met and support needs are high") so no one hunts for the why; every Disposition option gained checkable next actions; a new "Open questions before the housing discussion" card lists decision blockers, distinct from documents to collect; the availability disclaimer now appears once, said well, instead of three times; and the client page reworded its hand-over step around the emotional truth: "Take this page with you... you will not have to start over or retell every detail; this page already carries your story." The For-CoCs page notes what reviewers keep discovering: every completed HEAT arrives at case conference as a ready briefing.

Why: Workers do not read assessments; they work them. The reviewer's test is now this product's standing bar: if a worker finishes at 10:14 and does not know what to do at 10:15, the page failed, no matter how correct it is.

2026-07-30 · v0.30.3 · instrument 0.14.0-pilot

Change (external review, operational-utility round): Two messaging adoptions. The four-outputs section now leads with what HEAT does: "Assess. Explain. Recommend. Support." with "four outputs, never one score" as the supporting line rather than the headline, because a product is understood by what it does, not by what it refuses to be. And the For-CoCs section now says the honest thing about prioritization instead of only disclaiming: HEAT is designed to support housing prioritization by producing standardized, transparent, clinically meaningful findings; it does not determine queue position or allocate resources, and those decisions remain with written coordinated entry policy and case conferencing.

Answered rather than changed: The same review asked for a disposition section, recommended-interventions list, next-best-actions, and a documentation checklist so that no assessor finishes an assessment wondering what to do now. Those exist: the case-manager view leads with the Assessment Card, then the Do-next list (today and upcoming, checkable), then Documentation needed, then the Disposition drawer with per-option reasoning. The reviewer was reading a compliance benchmark report rather than the tool; the operational layer it asked for shipped across earlier rounds, several parts on the same reviewer's earlier advice.

2026-07-30 · v0.30.2 · instrument 0.14.0-pilot

Change: A full end-to-end review of the sample result in both views after the week's changes. Four seams found and fixed: the card's next steps said "4 items listed below" while the Do-next list said "2 documents" (the card was still counting the fine-print rules; both now count documents to collect); the client page said "the documents listed below" when its view has no document list (it now says the housing help office will go through the documentation together); "You told us you are staying outside" now reads "you have been staying outside," matching the question's where-did-you-stay-last-night basis; and the red zone label "Tonight problem" became "Urgent tonight." Everything else checked clean: confidence lines, disposition, veteran-household phrasing consistent from the situation line through the audit trail, and the coherence gate stays green.

2026-07-30 · v0.30.1 · instrument 0.14.0-pilot

Change (owner-adopted identity refinement): HEAT now describes itself as a structured housing triage assessment, replacing vulnerability-assessment framing. Triage is what the tool actually does: assess the current situation, identify interventions that appear appropriate for discussion, estimate expected support after housing, document the reasoning, and support scarce-resource decisions that remain the community's own. The mission statement on the landing page says exactly this, including what HEAT never does: assign a vulnerability score or determine queue position. The intervention section is now titled as a disposition. This aligns with HUD's own framework, which treats assessment, eligibility, scoring, and prioritization as distinct parts of coordinated entry.

2026-07-30 · v0.30.0 · instrument 0.14.0-pilot

Change (external clinical-decision-support review round): Every determination on the case-manager view now carries a confidence line: high, moderate, or low, stated as evidence quality with the reason, never as doubt about the person ("Confidence: moderate: self-report basis; third-party documentation still needed"). The Evidence Register gained a generated "What this answer changes" line for every question, computed from the rules themselves, so a reviewer can see exactly which rules read each answer, or that an answer changes no determination at all. A per-output harms analysis (which errors each determination can make, their consequences, and which error the design minimizes) is documented in the repository and referenced from Governance. The validation plan gained a reliability and calibration section: inter-rater, test-retest, cognitive interviewing, and usability, planned before pilot completion. The "no scores" bullet was reframed: medicine measures constantly; what fails is opaque, unvalidated ranking. And the review board's first seat is now explicitly a primary care physician experienced in homeless medicine, for the longitudinal-care perspective.

Declined, owner ruling: repositioning HEAT as a general "clinical reasoning engine" with coordinated entry as one application. HEAT is a coordinated entry assessment; communities want it for CE prioritization as HUD frames it, and that is what it will be validated as.

2026-07-29 · v0.29.0 · instrument 0.14.0-pilot

Change (four practitioner flags): Adopted: the pet paperwork question now comes directly after the pet question instead of later in the flow. And the living-situation question now asks "Where did you stay last night?" instead of "tonight": programs record the night before, the HMIS chronic-status logic keys on the night before, and a night that already happened is easier to answer than one that has not. Every surface that used this answer was resynchronized: the card status now reads "Slept outside last night" and the situation line says "as of last night," and the old phrasings joined the retired-wording list the build checks automatically.

Answered rather than changed: A second practitioner reported the first two safety questions feel similar, suggesting keeping only one. They stay separate for the recorded reason (danger-at-this-moment is a 911 triage fact; the violence situation is a category and routing fact), but two independent reports now make this a named cognitive-testing item. And the medical-emergency question stays, with the reviewer's point recorded: recent emergencies and ongoing conditions are indeed captured by other questions, and this screen's one job is live triage in assisted settings, where removing it would remove the only path that routes an active emergency out of the assessment.

2026-07-28 · v0.28.1 · instrument 0.13.0-pilot

Change: A full coherence sweep after a day of rapid changes, plus a machine to keep it that way. One seam found and fixed: the situation line on the card still said "An adult veteran" while the reworded question asks about military service in the household, so the person described could be the veteran's partner; the line now says "in a veteran household" and never asserts who served. The Evidence Register footer had also lagged one version behind; regenerated. A new automated coherence check now runs on every change: it fails the build if any page shows a different version than the others, if any retired wording reappears anywhere on the live site, or if the generated pages were not rebuilt after an instrument or version change.

Why: Fourteen releases shipped today. Fast surgery is only safe if something checks that the whole body still walks afterward; now something does, on every change, without anyone having to remember.

2026-07-28 · v0.28.0 · instrument 0.13.0-pilot

Change (four more practitioner flags, all adopted or adapted): The military question now asks about the whole household, because veteran-specific programs serve veteran families; a non-veteran with a veteran partner should still reach those resources, and the card chip now reads "Veteran in household." The overdose question was tightened so emergency help unrelated to drinking or drug use no longer reads as a yes. The suicide-history note on results was reworded per a practitioner's edit: history is not necessarily today, but ask. And the age question adapted from a PIT-style suggestion: eight bands including under 18, with 55-59 and 62-or-older splits because communities carry funding cutoffs at 55 and 62. The exact PIT bands were rejected because 55-64 would straddle the age-60 threshold the support-need evidence keys on. Under 18 produces routing only, to youth coordinated entry pathways, school liaisons, and youth providers, and the automated screening-out suite proves age can never lower any determination.

2026-07-28 · v0.27.1 · instrument 0.12.0-pilot

Change (practitioner feedback, credit Josh Johnson): Four adoptions. The intro now says why the questions are asked and how answers are used before anyone starts: facts in, explained determinations out, prioritization always the CoC's own written policy; it also states the right to decline or change any answer. "Permanent place" is now defined: somewhere you could stay as long as you wanted, lease or no lease. The ID question spells out what documents mean: state ID or driver license, birth certificate, Social Security card. And the Questions page explains where answers go, pointing to the Evidence Register.

Answered rather than changed, reasoning in the Evidence Register: the duration questions stay separate because each is a distinct quantity the federal definition requires and the cross-checks depend on them; the emergency-room question stays individual-level because the mortality evidence behind it is individual-level; the suicide question was reviewed against the trauma-informed request and already carries 988, optionality, and never-counts-against-you framing; an eviction-history question is deferred to pilot data since the active-case question already drives the time-critical legal-aid offer; and the what-worked question stays "pick the biggest one" deliberately.

2026-07-28 · v0.27.0 · instrument 0.11.0-pilot

Change: Two additions, both from practitioner Elisa. First, a pets question, adopted after evaluation rather than as-suggested: "Do you have a pet or animal that stays with you?" with one follow-up about assistance-animal paperwork. Pets are among the strongest housing-search barriers, and people turn down placements rather than leave an animal; under HUD Fair Housing guidance an assistance animal letter is a reasonable-accommodation path, so a missing letter now produces an offer-only support to get one early, and the fact appears on the card. Pets can never change any determination; that is enforced by the automated screening-out suite, not by promise. Count and kind stay out of the structured questions on purpose: the free-text note carries them, because a structured count would invite treating pets as a burden score. Second, her meta-point became policy: the Governance page now publishes "How feedback becomes change," the five tests every suggestion runs through (construct fit, necessity, question cost, the screening-out rule, evidence and traceability) and the four possible outcomes: adopt, adapt, answer without changing, or defer to pilot data.

Why: A feedback system that implements everything is as untrustworthy as one that ignores everything. The rubric was already how decisions were made; now it is written down where anyone can hold us to it.

2026-07-28 · v0.26.1 · instrument 0.10.0-pilot

Change: Two follow-ups from the practitioner round. The domestic-violence routing preference on a result now reads from the same gate-checked path the engines use, so if the violence answer is edited back to "no," a stale routing preference can no longer appear. And the children-not-with-you question gained help text distinguishing it from the reworded household question: one counts children who will live in the unit once housed, the other includes separated children who may not return, and it exists only so family-connection help can be offered, never required.

2026-07-28 · v0.26.0 · instrument 0.10.0-pilot · practitioner feedback round

Change: Twenty feedback flags arrived from working practitioners, with credit to Elisa and Daniel Gore, and most were adopted. Wording rewrites on fourteen questions: the medical question now clearly means an emergency at this moment; "just before this" now names the period it means; "a permanent place of your own" no longer assumes everyone has had one; "not meant for living" became "a place not meant for people to live in" everywhere; the children question now counts children who would return once housed, not only those present tonight; military service now includes boot camp or basic training; income dropped "from any source"; the stable-housing and stay-with-someone questions dropped assumptions that confused people; the functional-support question got shorter with open-ended examples; the ID question defines "can get them" as within a few days without money or travel. Structural changes: the violence question is now present-experience based ("Is someone hurting you...") with a new follow-up, "Do you want help leaving this situation?", and HUD Category 4 respects an explicit "not right now" while treating "yes" and "not sure" as attempting to flee; the emergency-room question moved from a six-month to a twelve-month window so time periods stop jumping around; the about-to-lose-housing question is no longer asked of people already on the street or in shelter, which also stops prevention advice from reaching unsheltered people; a progress bar now shows "Question N of about M"; "You can skip this" became instructions that actually match the interface; safety questions carry an inline leave-quickly link after a mobile report that the floating button was missed; and a veteran "yes" now suggests a Veterans Service Office visit for disability benefits.

Answered rather than changed: Date of birth stays uncollected in the public tool (it is identifying; the HMIS-assisted mode will confirm it instead). The suicide question stays limited to attempt history because a public tool with no clinician present is the wrong place for ideation screening; 988 remains on every path. The two safety questions stay separate because danger-at-this-moment and an unsafe situation are different facts with different consequences. Each answer is recorded in the Evidence Register.

Why: This is the standing challenge doing its job. Practitioners who interview people for a living found ambiguities no amount of desk review would have caught, and the instrument is versioned so every one of these changes is traceable.

2026-07-27 · v0.25.2 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Change (from a feedback flag): The back-to-top button was floating 60px above the bottom edge on every page except the assessment, because it always reserved space for the "Leave quickly" button that only the assessment has. It now sits even with the Feedback button, and lifts out of the way only on pages where "Leave quickly" actually exists. Reported through the site's own Feedback button, which is exactly what it is for.

2026-07-27 · v0.25.1 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Mistake (caught by the instrument owner): Glossary popups were eating spaces: "HUD homeless definition" rendered as "HUDhomeless definition" because wrapping a term inside a flex-laid-out label splits the text and flex layout swallows the whitespace between the pieces. Fixed at the root: the annotator now refuses to split text directly inside any flex or grid container, and the affected labels wrap their text in a plain span. A full visual pass of every page at phone, tablet, and desktop widths followed: no horizontal overflow anywhere, and two more defects found and fixed (the Documentation needed checkboxes lacked their list styling, and the Do-next count said 4 items while the visible list held 2 documents; the counting-rules entries live in the drawer, and history evidence was reclassified as a document to collect).

Also: The visit counter was reset to zero after our own automated testing inflated it; the completed-assessments count was unaffected. Automated browsers that identify themselves are now excluded from counting.

2026-07-27 · v0.25.0 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Change: The case-manager view was restructured around one idea from external review: the Assessment Card is the product, so it now leads the page, open, followed by the two things a busy worker actually needs: the Do-next list and a checkable Documentation needed list. Everything explanatory sits under a "Want more detail?" divider, collapsed: definitions, support planning, options, supports, reassessment, and the reasoning, now titled "Audit trail (N rules fired)" because that is what it is for: appeals, QA, and governance, not daily workflow. The at-a-glance summary table was removed by owner ruling: with the card first, the table repeated the card's opening screen. Working mode and audit mode are now visibly different depths of the same page.

Why: Every reader was getting the engineer's version. A case manager wants "what happened, what do I do, what documentation do I need" and should not have to scroll past the computation to find it. The depth still exists, one click away, and printing still includes everything.

2026-07-27 · v0.24.1 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot · chronicity rules r0.4.0

Change (a determination changed): When someone reports 12 or more cumulative months homeless but the number of separate occasions is unanswered, the chronicity result is now "unable to determine" instead of "likely meets, documentation incomplete." The reasoning names the occasion count as the deciding item: one continuous occasion meets, four or more meet, only exactly two or three do not.

Why: The instrument owner asked for the corpus rulings to be double-checked against documentation. The HMIS Reporting Glossary's own chronic-status decision table returns "missing" when the times-homeless count is missing, regardless of months. HEAT had ruled "likely meets" there; that was a deviation from the field-standard handling, so it was flipped the same day. Rules are versioned; this is r0.4.0, and every result records the rules version that produced it.

2026-07-27 · v0.24.0 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Change: The landing footer now shows how many page visits and completed assessments the site has had since 2026-07-27. The counters are bare totals: each page load and each finished real assessment (never the sample) adds one to a count. The request carries nothing else. No answers, no identifiers, no cookies, no fingerprints, nothing about any person. The privacy statement was tightened to say exactly this, and the site never depends on the counter service: if it is unreachable, nothing on the page breaks.

Why: Knowing whether anyone uses the tool is legitimate; watching people is not. This is the smallest measurement that answers the first question without doing the second.

2026-07-27 · v0.23.4 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Change: The chronicity scenario corpus (54 cases) completed review. 51 expectations were verified line by line against the verbatim sources: 24 CFR Part 578, the CPD-14-012 FAQ, HUD's chronic-definition flowchart and final-rule webinar, the 2023 Institutional Stays guidance, the HMIS Reporting Glossary decision table, and the LSA programming specifications. The remaining 3 cases are policy choices the documents cannot settle; the instrument owner ruled on each, all confirming encoded behavior: 12+ months with an unknown occasion count stays "likely meets" with the count flagged for verification; a single lone answer never rules someone out; and continuous duration uses the HMIS-style month comparison rather than calendar-months-touched. Full record in the repository rules document.

Why: The corpus was labeled "pending expert review" since it was written. It is now reviewed, and the review method is documented so it can be checked too.

2026-07-27 · v0.23.3 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Change: The case-manager card headline for someone without shelter now states the fact directly: "Unsheltered tonight" or "In emergency shelter tonight," dropping the "Housing crisis active" label that preceded it. Owner ruling, adopting an external reviewer's suggestion: the label competed with the fact, and the red band already carries the urgency. No determination changed.

2026-07-27 · v0.23.2 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Mistake: Term expansion was inconsistent. In "SSVF, HUD-VASH, HCHV" only HUD-VASH got a definition popup. Root cause: the glossary annotator stopped after the first matched term in each sentence, HCHV was missing from the glossary entirely, and the Evidence, Governance, and Change log pages never loaded the glossary at all.

Fix: The annotator now keeps scanning after each match, so every defined term in a sentence gets its popup. Added definitions: HCHV, GPD, VAWA, victim service provider (and VSP), SNAP, CFR, TH, DV, and the Federal Register citation for the chronic homelessness rule; expanded the HUD-VASH definition to state what the acronym means. The glossary now loads on every page. One-off citations were expanded in the source instead: "PIT GBV fact sheet" is now written out, "ADL/IADL battery" and "HUD TA reviewer" carry their expansions inline.

2026-07-27 · v0.23.1 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Change: In the chronic homelessness drawer, the documents to collect stay visible, but the rules about how HUD counts that documentation (the required documentation order, self-certification limits, and institutional-stay credit) now fold behind "How HUD counts this documentation (the fine print)". An unrecognized checklist item defaults to visible, never hidden, and printing opens every fold so the printed record is always complete.

Why: An external reviewer's only remaining verbosity note: everything in that section is accurate and belongs, but not everything belongs expanded by default. What to collect is today's work; how it is counted is reference material.

2026-07-27 · v0.23.0 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Change: The case-manager page stopped repeating itself. The same three verdicts used to appear three times (summary, card, drawers) and the next steps twice; now the at-a-glance summary is the screen's summary, the Do-next list is the action list, and the full Assessment Card lives in its own drawer as the print-ready record (printing opens it automatically). Every summary row carries an icon and a thin color-coded bar (red for active exposure, amber for actions needed, cyan for pathways, green for strengths) so color signals meaning without coloring the words. Every drawer now says in one muted line what is inside it, a jump bar goes straight to the Assessment Card, Options, Documentation, or Reasoning, and the view opens with one instruction: read the summary, work the list, open a drawer only when you need the why.

Why: A worker with seventeen people waiting will skip anything that looks like homework. One summary, one list, everything else on demand.

2026-07-27 · v0.22.0 · instrument 0.9.0-pilot

Change: A round of external-review refinements across every surface. The case-manager view now opens with a 30-second at-a-glance block (status, chronicity, population, support level, discuss-first, documentation count, biggest strength, biggest barrier) before the card, and the Do-next sheet is split into Today and Upcoming with the person's past housing success leading Upcoming. The support-planning drawer now states its conclusion in one plain sentence with the evidence behind an "Explain why" fold. The reasoning trace reads strongest-first (the record keeps computation order). Three questions were refined as new versions: "Looking back, what made it possible for you to stay housed?" with "a place that felt safe and stable" and "a routine or steady schedule" among the choices; the support question now includes appointments; the crisis-visit question reads more conversationally. The STOP page explains why continuing exists. The green zone label "On track" became "Next step ready" (nothing about sleeping outside is "on track"). "Treat this like a medical record" became "Treat this as confidential" (it is a housing assessment, not a medical record). And the front page now leads with the one sentence the whole product serves: every determination explains itself.

Why: External review round six, screenshots included. Held deliberately, with its concurrence: mortality-first construct stays until pilot data justifies changing it; age threshold stays at 60; the STOP page's continue friction stays as is.

2026-07-27 · v0.21.0 · instrument 0.8.0-pilot

Change: The instrument's first strengths-based question, by replacement rather than addition: "Was there ever a time when you had housing that worked well for you for six months or longer?" and, if yes, "What helped the most?" It replaced the employment question, whose signal the income question already carried everywhere it was used. The answer feeds support planning only: it appears on the card as a named strength, adds a build-on-what-worked offer, and never touches prioritization. Results also gained an optional free-text box: "Anything you want the housing help office to know?", printed on the page in the person's own words, never scored, never analyzed, never saved or sent.

Why: External review: nearly every assessment question asks what is wrong; one should ask what already works, because what happens after prioritization is where people succeed or fail. Deferred from the same review, deliberately: a barrier self-attribution question (overlaps existing items; sensitive self-labeling), prior-community-housing (the HMIS-assisted phase will confirm it instead of asking), and a four-point rewording of the support question (held for clinical review rather than churning a scored item).

Mistake, again: For a few minutes this page's history wrongly showed old entries with the new instrument version, from the same careless version-update we logged on this page at v0.13.0. Restored, and the update script is now forbidden from touching this file's history. Repeating a logged mistake is worse than making it.

2026-07-27 · v0.20.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Answering yes to "are you in danger right now" or the urgent-medical question now stops the assessment immediately with a full-screen red page: "Stop. Get help first.", with a Call 911 button, 988, and two honest choices: "I am safe enough at this moment, continue" or "Leave quickly (erases everything)." Nothing entered is lost while the page waits. If the person continues, a red reminder strip stays on every remaining screen.

Why: A tool should not calmly ask question two of twenty-five after someone says they are in danger. But it must interrupt, not eject: a survivor sitting safely in an advocate's office is describing her life, not this minute, and for her the assessment is the way out. Forcing people out of the housing line for saying yes would teach the most endangered people to say no. Interrupt, offer help, respect their answer.

2026-07-27 · v0.19.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Three fixes for the people actually holding the page. The client view now speaks plain words: "housing help office" instead of our field's "access point" (explained once, in parentheses), warm concrete steps, and a reminder that answers can always be changed and nothing is held against anyone. The case-manager view gained a "Do next" order sheet at the top: every output distilled into a short checkable action list (tonight's shelter check, what to raise first, the first documentation item, offers to make, the reassess-by date), modeled on medical order sheets; the drawers below keep the depth. And the openness claim now says exactly what is true: everything that matters is public on this site; the software itself is proprietary.

Why: A client should never need our vocabulary to get help, and a busy case manager needs orders, not a chart to excavate.

2026-07-27 · v0.18.1 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: A full audit of every claim this site makes, with each claim either backed by working machinery or reworded to what is true. Backed: continuous-integration tests now genuinely run on every change; the feedback form gained an optional name field so "credited" is real; printed records genuinely expand every section. Reworded: "the complete logic is published" became what is actually public today (every result's full reasoning, every question with its evidence; the open repository awaits a license decision); "211" is now "211 in most areas"; the victim-services route acknowledges some communities have no such provider; treatment information, not treatment, is what is ready on demand; "about ten minutes" became the verifiable "about 25 questions"; Category 1 is what programs require, not a door that opens.

Why: A tool that asks to be trusted on determinations cannot round up on anything else. No claim without machinery or evidence behind it.

2026-07-27 · v0.18.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: The case-manager record was a wall of nine stacked cards repeating what the Assessment Card already said. Now the card is the document, and everything else is a scannable drawer: one row per topic with its icon and verdict chip visible, open on demand (options to discuss starts open; everything prints expanded). Background pills now carry icons and color: population pathways in cyan, actionable barriers and exposure in amber. The brand mark gained a chimney, because a home should look warm.

Why: Nobody reads a wall. A record you can scan in five seconds and drill into in one click is what busy access-point staff actually need.

2026-07-27 · v0.17.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: The safety screen is now exception-only in every view. If a 911-type emergency is reported, a red "Get help now" banner leads the page and the card, with 911 and 988 in it. If not, the page says nothing about it: no "no immediate emergency identified" text, no neutral chip, nothing. The card leads with the person's actual housing status. The only non-emergency case that still surfaces is when the safety questions went unanswered, so a case manager knows to revisit them.

Why: Telling a person in a housing emergency "no immediate emergency identified" is a contradiction. Silence about the absence of one emergency, loud clarity about the presence of another. The determination itself is unchanged and remains in the record and reasoning trace.

2026-07-27 · v0.16.1 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Mistake: The assessment card's most prominent element was a green checkmark reading "No immediate emergency identified", on a person sleeping outside in month 13. The safety screen only checks for 911-type emergencies, so nearly everyone got a green all-clear as their headline. The determination was correct; the presentation was misleading, and it contradicted the intensive support level printed right below it.

Fix: The card's status band now composes the safety screen with tonight's housing reality: unsheltered or in shelter shows a red "Housing crisis active" band; a facility stay, imminent housing loss, or doubled-up shows an amber caution band; green is reserved for people not in a housing crisis. The safety-screen result is stated underneath as "No 911-type emergency reported." No determination changed; only what the headline honestly says.

2026-07-27 · v0.16.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Results now have two views with a toggle: "For the client" (written to the person: their situation, their next steps, ready to print and hand over) and "For the case manager" (the professional record: determinations, documentation checklist, reasoning, reassessment). The starting view follows who is filling it out; either can switch any time. Section icons throughout the results.

Why: One page cannot speak to two readers at once. A case manager reading "you told us you are staying outside" on their own screen is jarring; a client handed a page of rule IDs is worse. Same facts, two documents.

2026-07-27 · v0.15.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Visual and honesty pass. New logo and favicon, section icons, back-to-top button. More important: a reality-check of every operational statement. The results page no longer implies a shelter bed exists tonight; it now says to ask an access point or 211, that HUD policy bars rationing beds by severity where they exist, and that beds are never guaranteed. "Crisis response is immediate" became "crisis services are never held behind a coordinated entry waitlist; what actually exists tonight depends on your community." The options list now states plainly that HEAT cannot see local openings.

Why: This tool is used where the rubber meets the road. A suggestion is honest; a promise about tonight's capacity is not ours to make.

2026-07-27 · v0.14.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Two new public pages. The Evidence Register: for every question, the evidence behind it, why it stays, alternatives rejected, known risks (including where a neutral-looking fact could act as a proxy), and honest review status. The Governance page: how decisions are made, checked, corrected, and challenged, plus open review-board seats. The register is generated from the instrument itself and the build fails if any question lacks an entry.

Why: External review advice we agree with: the long-term goal is a process that convinces people even if they do not trust the designer. The governance is the product.

2026-07-27 · v0.13.0 · instrument 0.7.0-pilot

Change: Two questions reworded as new versions after external review: the cold-injury question now says "because you could not get warm" (a mountaineering frostbite from years ago is not homelessness risk), and the overdose question adds "or did someone have to revive you" (naloxone from a friend often is not counted as emergency help). New facility question: expected discharge within days now triggers plan-before-discharge urgency. Rule thresholds (4 crisis contacts, 12 months, 6 months) moved into editable instrument data with published rationale, and every rule now carries an evidence tier (direct, indirect, expert synthesis). Results say "Determination quality: Complete / Limited by missing information" instead of a bare completeness label.

Why: An external reviewer challenged the "ever" scope, recall framing, threshold justification, and rule-interaction validation. They were right on all four. We also added property tests proving no combination of answers can behave pathologically: risk answers can only raise, declines never count as anything, supersets never rank lower.

Evidence: Round-3 external review; docs/SUPPORT_NEED_RULES.md carries the full per-rule rationale.

Also fixed on this very page: a version-string update accidentally rewrote the version labels of two historical entries below before deployment. Restored from the record. A changelog that edits its own history is worse than no changelog.

2026-07-24 · v0.12.0 · instrument 0.6.0-pilot

Change: Soft-support offers added from government clinical guidance: naloxone kit after an overdose disclosure, unconditional treatment-access information, a concrete follow-up plus trusted-person reconnection after a suicide-attempt disclosure, medical respite after a health event or facility exit. Discharge guidance now directs contact with the facility's discharge planner.

Why: SAMHSA, NIMH, CMS, and HRSA guidance all pair risk identification with a concrete protective offer. A hotline reference alone is not enough.

Evidence: SAMHSA Overdose Prevention Toolkit; SAMHSA SAFE-T; SBIRT; NIMH ASQ; CMS discharge planning conditions; HRSA-funded medical respite standards.

2026-07-24 · v0.11.0 · instrument 0.6.0-pilot

Change: The support-planning construct was rebuilt around mortality evidence. Three health event-history questions were added (cold injury, overdose, suicide attempt), each skippable, each shown on screen only and never printed. Income and employment were removed from the vulnerability determination entirely.

Why: HEAT's purpose is identifying who is most likely to die if left in homelessness. Event-history binaries are the strongest known markers; income is a program-fit fact, not vulnerability, and carries disclosure bias.

Evidence: Hwang 1998 (JAMA); Roncarati 2018 (JAMA Internal Medicine); the LA CES triage-tool research report; HUD CE Equity Initiative guidance.

2026-07-24 · v0.10.0 · instrument 0.5.0-pilot

Change: The safety screen was reworded to describe a situation ("someone is hurting you, scaring you, or making you do things you do not want to do") instead of naming violence categories, and a consent question now lets survivors choose who helps them.

Why: HUD trauma-informed guidance: behavior-based questions identify people who do not label their experience as violence, including trafficking. Routing must be the survivor's choice.

Evidence: HUD Trauma-Informed Care guidance; CE and Victim Service Providers FAQs; VAWA 2022 requirements.

2026-07-23 · v0.9.2 · defect, honestly logged

Mistake: We shipped a rendering defect where every answer option could look already-selected on some system-theme combinations. Nobody's answers were affected (nothing was pre-selected in the data), but it looked broken and it was our fault.

Root cause: The page's color-scheme did not follow the chosen theme, so native form controls rendered in the wrong palette.

Fix: Radios are now custom-drawn and identical everywhere; visual QA now covers both themes on both OS appearances before any release.

2026-07-23 · instrument 0.2.0-pilot · wording defect caught pre-pilot

Mistake: Early history questions asked about time "without your own housing," which would have counted doubled-up time toward chronic homelessness and inflated determinations.

Fix: History questions now ask specifically about streets, shelters, and safe havens, matching the federal definition. Caught during the primary-source verification pass, before any real use.

Evidence: 24 CFR 578.3; Federal Register preamble (80 FR 75791).