diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 4b3caa04..4a4ba067 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -18,6 +18,54 @@ is only released once its **exit criterion** is met, not when its code lands.
 Until v1.0.0 the minor version is the breaking one: configuration formats and Go
 APIs change between minors without a deprecation period.
 
+## v0.8.1 — 2026-09-28
+
+Nothing here changes a configuration format: every file that worked with
+v0.8.0 still works. What changes is how much of it needs writing, and how much
+of running the cluster can be done from a page rather than a shell.
+
+### A node describes itself
+
+An agent file used to name its node, its address, the path to llama-server and
+its weight directories — different on every node and kept true by hand. The
+agent now finds these out: its id is the hostname, its address is the one on
+the route to the control plane, llama-server is looked for on PATH and in
+`/opt/llama.cpp`, a node without nvidia-smi simply has no NVIDIA cards, and
+fetched weights land in `/var/lib/llmgw-weights`, which is always scanned.
+Memory is re-read on every heartbeat and installed engines once a minute, so a
+VM given more RAM or a node given an engine becomes a candidate without an
+agent restart; the control plane logs both. The agent file shrinks to the
+control plane's addresses and the TLS files, the same on every node.
+
+### Models from the mirror, without writing YAML
+
+Search the registry from `/admin/mirror`, fetch a sharded model in one action,
+and serve a mirrored version from its row — name, source, engine and an
+estimated memory requirement filled in. A model can say what it is for, and
+`/v1/models` shows it. Placement no longer hands the same memory to two models
+or puts an engine on a node that lacks it, and says when a replica runs an
+edited profile.
+
+### Tenancy, quotas and usage on pages
+
+The tenancy tree, quotas and budgets are managed from the admin pages; an
+organization's budget bounds its teams, a group's quota counts against the
+group, and a budget that cannot be spent against says so. `/admin/usage`
+charts requests, tokens and spend over time by organization, team, project or
+person, and a request is priced by the model that served it.
+
+### Watching the cluster
+
+The cluster page has its own charts, backed by a year of Prometheus history,
+with alerts that were made to fire before being trusted — including for the
+disk the metrics share with the models.
+
+### Chat
+
+The picker offers each model once rather than once per alias, never asks for
+more tokens than the model allows, and offers a model that loads on demand —
+sending it a message is what loads it.
+
 ## v0.8.0 — 2026-09-27
 
 The store stops being a file on one machine's disk. PostgreSQL, a way to move