Prepare 1.0.0-alpha.1 release

- CHANGELOG: document the 1.0 framework rewrite
- CI: build Python wheels only on release tags + manual dispatch,
  not on every push/PR

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

.github/workflows/python.yml

@@ -2,11 +2,13 @@
 #    maturin generate-ci github -m crates/vtracer-py/Cargo.toml
 name: Python
 
+# Wheel builds are heavy (full platform matrix), so they run only on release
+# tags and on-demand — not on every push/PR. Rust/wasm/Node CI (rust.yml) still
+# gates ordinary commits.
 on:
   push:
     tags:
       - '*'
-  pull_request:
   workflow_dispatch:
 
 permissions:

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -5,6 +5,31 @@ All notable changes to this project will be documented in this file.
 The format is based on [Keep a Changelog](http://keepachangelog.com/)
 and this project adheres to [Semantic Versioning](http://semver.org/).
 
+## 1.0.0-alpha.1 - 2026-07-24
+
+Ground-up rewrite of VTracer into a **vectorization framework** with pluggable stages.
+
+### Added
+
+* Pluggable pipeline: swappable frontend (segmentation), color fitting (incl. custom palettes), curve-fitting backend, and an optimizer pass phase.
+* **Mosaic mode**: true seam-free, gapless tessellation via shared boundary-graph tracing (pixel, polygon, and spline fitters), replacing the old "cutout" that produced seams.
+* SVG optimizer: relative path syntax, shorthand commands, and coordinate-precision reduction for smaller files.
+* `@visioncortex/vtracer` Node.js package (npm): wasm core with a native image reader.
+* Rewritten Python bindings (`vtracer-py`) with a richer API; pyo3 bumped to 0.26 (fixes CPython 3.14 segfaults, #124).
+* CLI accepts positional `input`/`output` arguments (#114).
+
+### Changed
+
+* Workspace restructured into `crates/vtracer` (core lib), `crates/vtracer-cli`, `crates/vtracer-py`, and `nodejs/`.
+* CLI upgraded from clap 2.x to 4.x (#118).
+* `filter_speckle` CLI cap raised from 16 to 128, matching the web app (#115).
+* Depends on `visioncortex` 0.9.
+* Python wheel CI now runs only on release tags and manual dispatch, not on every commit.
+
+### Removed
+
+* The pre-1.0 `cmdapp` crate and the demo webapp GUI.
+
 ## 0.6.12 - 2026-02-04
 
 * Python Binding