Got caught up on some bug reports yesterday. The main one was odd behavior of the assistant when the repository was in manual mode. A recent change to the preferred content expression caused it. But the expression was not broken. The problem was in the parser, which got the parentheses wrong in this case. I had to mostly rewrite the parser, unfortunately. I've tested the new one fairly extensively -- on the other hand this bug lurked in the old parser for several years (this same code is used for matching files with command-line parameters).
Just as I finished with that, I noticed another bug. Turns out git-cat-file doesn't reload the index after it's started. So last week's changes to make git-annex check the state of files in the index won't work when using the assistant. Luckily there was an easy workaround for this.
Today I finished up some robustness fixes, and added to the test suite checks for preferred content expressions, manual mode, etc.
I've started a stress test, syncing 2 repositories over XMPP, with the fuzz tester running in each to create lots of changes to keep in sync.