GitHub Release: Hmbown/Codewhale v0.9.2 (30.07.2026)

$ git clone https://github.com/Hmbown/Codewhale.git Clone

Codewhale is the public product from Shannon Labs. The codewhale

command, npm package, and release-asset names remain lowercase technical

identifiers. The legacy npm package deepseek-tui is deprecated and

receives no further releases. Users coming from v0.8.x legacy deepseek /

deepseek-tui names should migrate with docs/REBRAND.md.

Install

Recommended — npm (one command, all three entrypoints)

npm install -g codewhale

The wrapper downloads the matched codewhale, codew, and codewhale-tui

binaries from this Release and places them in the same directory.

Docker / GHCR

docker run --rm -it \

  -e DEEPSEEK_API_KEY="$DEEPSEEK_API_KEY" \

  -v codewhale-home:/home/codewhale/.codewhale \

  ghcr.io/hmbown/codewhale:v0.9.2

The image ships the codewhale dispatcher, codew shim, and codewhale-tui runtime. The latest tag is also updated on release.

Cargo (Linux / macOS)

cargo install codewhale-cli codewhale-tui --locked

Both crates are required — codewhale-cli produces the codewhale dispatcher and codew shim, while codewhale-tui produces the interactive runtime that the dispatcher delegates to. Installing only one crate will fail at runtime with a MISSING_COMPANION_BINARY error.

Manual download — platform archives (recommended)

Each archive below contains the codewhale dispatcher, codew shim, and codewhale-tui runtime, plus an install script:

Unix (Linux / macOS):

tar xzf codewhale-<platform>.tar.gz

cd codewhale-<platform>

./install.sh

Windows:

• For the installer path, run CodeWhaleSetup.exe; it installs codewhale.exe, codew.exe, and codewhale-tui.exe under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\CodeWhale\bin and adds that directory to the current-user PATH.


• Extract the archive for your machine: codewhale-windows-x64.zip or
  
  codewhale-windows-arm64.zip


• Run install.bat (copies to %USERPROFILE%\bin)


• Add %USERPROFILE%\bin to your PATH

The portable Windows archive skips the install script — extract and run from any directory. The NSIS installer is currently unsigned and may trigger Windows SmartScreen until a signing certificate is wired into the release pipeline.

Each platform also has bare, unarchived binaries attached below (codewhale-<platform>, codew-<platform>, and codewhale-tui-<platform>) — the npm wrapper and the in-app codewhale update download the matched runtime binaries, whereas the .tar.gz / .zip archives above are the recommended manual download and additionally bundle an install script. The legacy npm package deepseek-tui is deprecated and is not republished. For migration from v0.8.x legacy binary names, see docs/REBRAND.md.

Verify (recommended)

Download the checksum manifests from this Release and verify:

# Linux — archive bundles

sha256sum -c codewhale-bundles-sha256.txt --ignore-missing



# Linux — individual binaries

sha256sum -c codewhale-artifacts-sha256.txt --ignore-missing



# macOS

shasum -a 256 -c codewhale-bundles-sha256.txt --ignore-missing

shasum -a 256 -c codewhale-artifacts-sha256.txt --ignore-missing

What's in v0.9.2

This is the Codewhale v0.9.2 source candidate. It is not a published release

until the matching tag, packages, checksums, and release assets exist.

Changed — behavior

• 
  

  Legacy model = auto no longer elects a network classifier on its own.
  
  Holding a DeepSeek API key used to silently select deepseek-v4-flash as the
  
  classifier for every Auto turn — a per-turn cost on a route nobody asked for,
  
  and one provider privileged over the rest. Auto now stays local and free
  
  unless an explicit [auto.router] block names a provider and model.

  
  

  If you relied on the implicit default, restore it explicitly:

  
  

  [auto.router]
  
  provider = "deepseek"
  
  model = "deepseek-v4-flash"

  
  

  [auto.router] remains legacy model = auto configuration. It is unrelated
  
  to a Fleet's Adaptive Reasoning Router, which is a saved service referenced by
  
  name from a Fleet file and decides only how hard an already-frozen route
  
  thinks.

  
  

Landed since v0.9.1, not yet released. A cluster of defects found by a

read-through audit of the policy engine, the MCP proxy, the session index,

and the app-server bridge — several of them cases where the wrong outcome

was reached silently, behind a response or a log line that looked fine. The

release also adds opt-in session, reasoning, localization, and inspectability

surfaces; existing defaults remain stable unless an entry below explicitly

says otherwise.

Added

• 
  

  /permissions now lists the active user permission-rule source, each rule's
  
  effective matcher and global/repository scope, and whether that scope applies
  
  in the current workspace. /permissions remove <number> previews deletion
  
  and requires a snapshot-bound confirmation token, so a concurrent edit
  
  cannot move a different rule under the confirmed index. Appends and removals
  
  share one adjacent lock, preserve unrelated TOML formatting and comments,
  
  atomically replace permissions.toml, and reload the live user ruleset
  
  without clearing session-only approvals. /config ask-rules remains a
  
  compatibility entry; rule creation, glob/directory rules, and deny
  
  persistence remain out of scope ( by , by ).

  
  


• 
  

  /lane [list|status|interrupt|restart|resume] — durable Lane control from the
  
  composer, backed by the same executor codewhale lane … calls. codewhale lane interrupt|restart|resume are the matching CLI verbs; lane stop stays as
  
  a compatibility spelling of lane interrupt. Appending @<lifecycle-seq> to a
  
  lane id fences a write to the exact durable generation you observed, so a
  
  concurrent transition is rejected as a conflict rather than acted on ().

  
  


• 
  

  The bundled skill pack now ships a help skill (catalog generation 7). It is
  
  invocation: explicit-only, so it never enters the model's ambient catalogue
  
  and costs no prompt budget. Its body is a routing card that points at the
  
  surfaces this build actually exposes — /help and /help <command>,
  
  /skills and /skills inspect, /config, doctor, and the docs/ tree
  
  when the workspace is a Codewhale checkout — and explicitly forbids pasting a
  
  command list or settings table into context ().

  
  


• 
  

  Locale-routing coverage for the complete bundled catalog across every shipped
  
  locale (en, ja, zh-Hans, zh-Hant, pt-BR, es-419, vi, ko). No
  
  bundled skill ships a localized routing description and none was invented;
  
  the tested contract is deterministic fallback to the canonical English
  
  description, with the rendered catalogue byte-identical across locales.
  
  Exact-tag match, primary-subtag fallback, and English fallback are covered
  
  against a synthetic authored fixture, and the parity test fails if a bundled
  
  skill ever gains localized metadata without source-backed coverage ().

  
  


• 
  

  Approval cards can now remember eligible safe shell and file-write approvals
  
  as exact allow rules scoped to the current repository. Remembered shell
  
  commands use complete-command matching, validated file and patch paths remain
  
  workspace-relative, and dangerous, critical, or repo-law-held requests stay
  
  ineligible and continue to require review.

  
  


• 
  

  tui.header_items (array of strings, optional, default []): an opt-in
  
  header chip showing cumulative session token usage as input / cache-hit /
  
  output. Set header_items = ["tokens"] under [tui] to enable it. The
  
  chip is the only elidable element of the header — the git label, context
  
  meter, and version stamp keep their space, and narrow terminals drop the
  
  chip rather than the baseline chrome. Unknown entries are warned about and
  
  skipped so configs written by newer builds stay loadable by older ones
  
  (; PR , harvested with
  
  co-authorship).

  
  


• 
  

  thinking_default_expanded lets reasoning blocks start open while keeping
  
  Space as the per-block toggle. The setting is persisted, available through
  
  native and runtime configuration, and documented for SSH/tmux accessibility
  
  (issue by by
  
  ; reported by
  
  .

  
  


• 
  

  Session control now includes a sessions rail, shared archive projection,
  
  picker archive controls, and opt-in interactive auto-resume with explicit
  
  handoff behavior. The work closes the remaining session-browsing direction
  
  from for the original report.

  
  


• 
  

  The bundled contributor-onboarding skill can sync contribution context,
  
  select the appropriate gate, and prepare a digest without inflating the
  
  ambient skill catalog. It follows the contributor-navigation request in
  
  .

  
  


• 
  

  Bahasa Indonesia now has a complete repository documentation suite and a
  
  registered website dictionary alongside the shipped TUI locale (PRs by ).

  
  


• 
  

  Reasoning content can keep its rail, italics, cursor, and expansion controls
  
  while disabling only the warm background highlight. The independent setting
  
  is persisted and localized (; reported by by by by
  
  by ).

  
  


• 
  

  Interrupted checkpoints and timed recovery snapshots remain checkpoints
  
  instead of being promoted into orphan session files, preventing duplicate
  
  /resume entries (PR ).

  
  


• 
  

  Every shipped locale is admitted by the typed settings schema and native
  
  chooser, with complete/partial status kept independent and tested (PR , closing by in
  
  by ).

  
  


• 
  

  Non-streaming model calls receive a generation-length response budget rather
  
  than the SSE header-open timeout, while actual SSE opens share the bounded
  
  cross-provider transport seam. The equivalent fix direction came from
  
  closed PR .

  
  


• 
  

  Resumed sessions diagnose a deleted inherited workspace before shell launch
  
  instead of failing as an opaque Windows process error (report ). DeepSeek native tool-call wrapper tokens are also scrubbed
  
  from visible streaming and completed output as a grounded fail-soft follow-up
  
  to report ; that report's exact emitted marker remained
  
  unconfirmed.

  
  


• 
  

  Auto model routing now preserves the user's requested reasoning effort
  
  through startup, provider/model changes, session restore, the picker,
  
  Ctrl+T, and Hotbar actions. The tier is normalized only after the concrete
  
  provider route is known instead of being silently replaced by Auto
  
  ( by ).
  
  Implemented in PR ; reported and root-caused by
  
  ).

  
  


• 
  

  codewhale fleet status (and list/interrupt/resume) created
  
  .codewhale/fleet.jsonl as a side effect of opening the manager, then
  
  reported no_fleet_ledger for the file it had just made — so the second
  
  invocation showed an empty Fleet where none existed. The CLI now refuses
  
  those verbs before the manager is constructed, matching /fleet ().

  
  


• 
  

  lane interrupt reported transitioned even when it changed nothing —
  
  another process's stop looked like our own. The Runtime backend now reports
  
  whether this call performed the transition, and a no-op is no_change.
  
  The @<lifecycle-seq> fence is also evaluated inside the registry's per-Lane
  
  lock rather than before it, so a stale fence refuses without running Runtime
  
  teardown instead of racing between the check and the stop ().

  
  


• 
  

  The hotbar is no longer modelled as a third control surface. A slot binds a
  
  slash command and fires it with no argument, so it runs as the slash
  
  surface; the contract now declares which verb a bare press actually reaches
  
  (hotbar_bare_dispatch, true only for lane.list) instead of advertising
  
  target-taking verbs as hotbar-reachable ().

  
  


• 
  

  No surface advertises a backend it does not have. lane restart and
  
  lane resume have no implementation — a Lane is re-created by
  
  codewhale lane start, and a stopped Lane's Runtime session is gone — so all
  
  three surfaces refuse them with backend_not_implemented and say why.
  
  fleet restart drives the manager loop to completion, which only the CLI
  
  runs, so /fleet restart reports surface_not_supported and names the CLI
  
  command rather than quietly doing a smaller thing ( by
  
  by
  
  ). Fleet keeps
  
  Fleet/member concerns; /goal moved to a Session section and Workflow
  
  orchestration to its own Workflow section. The inert DeepSeek-only
  
  default_model fallback moved out of Model settings into an explicit
  
  Legacy section — exact-Fleet users switch Fleets, not fallback models;
  
  the config field is retained because the runtime still reads it. This is
  
  presentation only: the persisted keys (goal_command, workflow,
  
  default_model), their values, scopes, and runtime behavior are unchanged.

  
  


• 
  

  Auto model routing is scoped to the active provider. The classifier
  
  inventory no longer discloses other providers' runnable routes (or the fact
  
  that their credentials exist), a classifier reply naming another provider is
  
  refused, the local heuristic no longer falls back to a different provider
  
  when the active one is unusable, and the implicit DeepSeek-flash classifier
  
  is skipped for non-DeepSeek sessions. Auto receipts and the model picker
  
  hint report the active-provider-only scope instead of "runnable providers".
  
  Cross-provider Auto is available only through the persisted [auto] cross_provider = true opt-in (an explicit [auto.router] route remains its
  
  own opt-in for the classifier call). Same-provider strong/fast selection and
  
  [auto] cost_saving are unchanged.

  
  


• 
  

  The QA pseudo-terminal acceptance harness now parses frames with rio-vt
  
  behind its existing neutral frame/color surface, retaining the assertions
  
  while removing the vt100 dependency (PR ).

  
  


• 
  

  Anthropic Messages and OpenAI Responses stream opening now share the
  
  client/stream_entry.rs seam already used by Chat Completions: one bounded
  
  response-header wait, shared dual/HTTP-1.1 policy selection, at most one
  
  HTTP/1.1 fallback on a classified HTTP/2 header stall, and common idle-timeout
  
  diagnostics. Wire-specific authentication, headers, endpoints, decoding, and
  
  rate-limit behavior remain at each adapter edge. The timeout-placement
  
  diagnosis and fix direction came from closed PR .

  
  

Security

• Release containers now publish an SBOM attestation and pin maximum-mode
  
  provenance explicitly so supply-chain metadata cannot silently weaken with a
  
  builder-default change (PR ).

Contributors

Thank you to the contributors whose code, reports, and reviews shaped v0.9.2:

• ), plus safe
  
  permission-rule listing and snapshot-bound removal (PR — off-event-loop clipboard
  
  writes (PR ), CRLF-safe
  
  edits (PR ).


• ) and context-menu hover alignment (PR — the hooks configuration/executor
  
  split from PR (snailoniu) — OpenCode Zen's
  
  model-aware routes, authentication, documentation, and test isolation from
  
  closed PR — the zh-Hans translation
  
  quality review harvested from PR ,
  
  LaTeX implementation from PR , and the context-menu
  
  reproduction in — the request-preview concept from
  
  PR — non-UTF-8 fetch_url
  
  decoding direction from PR — required source-candidate credit for
  
  the canonical Bash no-cwd workspace fix and regression in PR ).


• .


• ) and the Indonesian documentation and website locale (PRs ).


• , issue — migration of the QA PTY frame
  
  parser to rio-vt (PR — truthful finalization of restored
  
  stale shell cells (PR — release-container SBOM and
  
  explicit provenance mode (PR ,
  
  — equivalent fix
  
  direction for the effective-home sweep (), and streaming/non-streaming timeout split ( — the LaTeX transcript
  
  rendering report in — the token-header request and
  
  output-presentation measurements in .


• .


• ,
  
  ,
  
  — reports and product direction behind
  
  the stale-workspace diagnosis (),
  
  contributor onboarding (),
  
  session control ().

See for older releases.