diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index bdf89641a..86954ca4f 100644
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 # Changelog
 
+## [1.57.2.0] - 2026-06-08
+
+## **When the question picker breaks mid-skill, gstack asks in plain text instead of stalling.**
+## **Every skill detects a dead AskUserQuestion and falls back to a full decision brief you answer by typing a letter.**
+
+AskUserQuestion is how every gstack skill asks you to decide. When the host's question
+tool fails at runtime, which Conductor's MCP integration currently does intermittently,
+skills used to stall or hard-block. Now each skill detects the failure, works out
+whether a human is actually present, and if so re-renders the exact same decision as a
+text message: a plain-English explanation of the issue, a completeness score on each
+choice, and a recommendation with its reason, one paragraph per choice. You answer by
+typing a single letter. Headless eval runs still block cleanly (no human to answer);
+orchestrator sessions keep auto-choosing. This whole release was built and reviewed
+through that fallback, because the Conductor tool was down the entire session.
+
+### The numbers that matter
+
+No production benchmark for a reliability path like this. These are the behavior and
+coverage facts, verifiable with `bun test test/gstack-session-kind.test.ts
+test/resolver-ask-user-format.test.ts test/auq-error-fallback-hook.test.ts`.
+
+| When AskUserQuestion fails | Before | After |
+|---|---|---|
+| Interactive session (human present) | stall / hard BLOCK | full prose decision brief, answer by letter |
+| Headless eval / CI | BLOCK | BLOCK (unchanged, correct) |
+| Orchestrator (OpenClaw) session | undefined | auto-choose recommended (contract kept) |
+| Session kinds detected | 0 | 3 (interactive / headless / spawned) |
+| New tests guarding the path | 0 | 34 |
+
+The text brief is not a degraded stub. It carries the same three things the picker
+shows: a clear explanation of what is being decided, a `Completeness: X/10` on every
+choice, and a recommendation with the reason it wins.
+
+### What this means for you
+
+If your host's question tool flakes out, a skill no longer dies on you. You get the
+same decision to make, in text, and you reply with a letter. Nothing changes when the
+tool works normally. If you run gstack headless, those sessions still block on a needed
+question exactly as before, so eval determinism is intact.
+
+### Itemized changes
+
+#### Added
+- `gstack-session-kind` classifies each session as interactive, headless, or spawned,
+  echoed as `SESSION_KIND` at skill start so any skill can branch on it.
+- Plain-text fallback for AskUserQuestion: on a tool failure in an interactive session,
+  the skill renders the full decision brief (issue ELI10 + per-choice completeness +
+  recommendation) as markdown you answer by typing a letter, then stops and waits.
+- A defensive hook that, when an AskUserQuestion call errors, reminds the agent to run
+  the fallback for the current session kind.
+
+#### Changed
+- AskUserQuestion is still sent as a normal tool call; the prose path applies only when
+  the tool is unavailable or erroring, and never on a `[plan-tune auto-decide]` result.
+
+#### Fixed
+- Section-loading tests use the canonical kebab test names, so the test-coverage gate
+  matches them.
+- External-host doc-freshness checks are deterministic, no longer dependent on a prior
+  full regeneration.
+
+#### For contributors
+- The eval/E2E runners set `GSTACK_HEADLESS=1` so headless runs classify correctly;
+  interactive-path suites opt out per-run.
+- Per-skill `maxSizeRatio` override in the carve-guards registry; `document-release`
+  gets 1.08 headroom for the cross-cutting preamble addition while every other skill
+  keeps the 1.05 ceiling.
+
 ## [1.57.0.0] - 2026-06-07
 
 ## **Three more heavyweight skills load lighter, and every carved skill finally has a test that proves it loads.**
diff --git a/VERSION b/VERSION
index a17d4bbc0..b2235f08b 100644
--- a/VERSION
+++ b/VERSION
@@ -1 +1 @@
-1.57.0.0
+1.57.2.0