chore: reconcile dev branch with main (24 commits behind, 3 PRs blocked)

[cagataycali]

Problem

The dev branch has diverged significantly from main:

• main → dev: 24 commits ahead (dev is missing these)
• dev → main: 5 commits ahead (dev has unique work)
• Last dev commit: 2026-03-14 (12 days stale)

What main has that dev is missing

• LeRobot local integration (PR feat: add lerobot_local policy - direct HuggingFace inference with RTC support #56)
• Policy registry & GR00T N1 upgrade (PR feat: upgrade GR00T policy — N1.5/N1.6 auto-detection, external inference, typed data configs #55)
• Ruff migration — flake8/isort → ruff (PR refactor: migrate linting from black+isort+flake8 to ruff #73)
• AGENTS.md and documentation updates

What dev has that main is missing

• @awsarron's refactors from PRs refactor: split newton_backend.py into package modules #38–refactor: extract BaseGymEnv to deduplicate gym wrappers #47 era

Impact

Three of four open PRs target dev, and all are affected:

PR	Title	Status	Impact
#52	feat: Device Connect integration	Active (updated today)	Will conflict with main's factory.py changes
#50	fix: Newton up_axis enum	CI ✅ but stale	May have silent conflicts
#48	feat: Zenoh dashboard	CI ❌ failing	Likely failing due to missing ruff config

The longer this divergence persists, the harder reconciliation becomes.

Options

1. Merge main → dev — preserves dev commit history, creates a merge commit, may have conflicts to resolve manually
2. Rebase dev onto main — cleaner linear history, but rewrites dev commits (affects open PRs targeting dev)
3. Merge dev → main, then delete dev — if the dev-branch workflow is no longer needed, collapse everything into main and use feature branches going forward

Recommendation

Option 3 seems cleanest if the team is comfortable with a main-only branching strategy. The 5 unique dev commits should be reviewed and merged into main (or cherry-picked), then PRs #48, #50, #52 can be retargeted to main.

However, this is an architectural/workflow decision for the maintainers. Flagging for visibility.

/cc @awsarron