GitHub Release: codewhale-hq/Codewhale v0.9.9 (18.08.2026)

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, both entrypoints)

npm install -g codewhale

The wrapper downloads the matched codewhale and codew command assets

from this Release. Both contain the same compiled runtime.

Docker / GHCR

docker run --rm -it \

  -e DEEPSEEK_API_KEY="$DEEPSEEK_API_KEY" \

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

  ghcr.io/hmbown/codewhale:v0.9.9

The image exposes the same runtime as both codewhale and codew. The

latest tag is also updated on release.

Cargo (Linux / macOS)

cargo install codewhale-cli --locked

The Cargo package installs codewhale. Cargo cannot create a second command

alias from one binary target; users who want the shorter spelling can add a

codew symlink to that installed executable. The npm, Homebrew, archive,

shell-installer, and container channels install both command names directly.

Manual download — platform archives (recommended)

Each archive below contains the same runtime under the codewhale and

codew command names, 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 and codew.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 codewhale-<platform> and

codew-<platform> assets. The seven codewhale-tui-<platform> filenames

attached to v0.9.5 are byte-identical compatibility copies used only to let

already-installed v0.9.4 clients discover and cross this single-binary

transition; current installers do not expose a third runtime. 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 v0.9.9

Codewhale v0.9.9 is a truth-and-resilience release: the shell tool can no

longer wedge a session when the host runs out of disk or descriptors,

unverified context windows and output ceilings are labeled honestly at every

surface, DeepSeek V4 is priced on the published peak/off-peak tiers, SSE

UTF-8 fails closed in every dialect, Fleet shadowing is visible, bwrap gets

container essentials and extra roots, the dsh skin rides the bundle

profile, the agent tool schema is down to 12 fields, and README/website

locales grow to 18 and 8.

Fixed

• The lowercase bash tool no longer wedges when its complete-output spill
  
  file cannot be created: a full temp volume or exhausted descriptor table
  
  used to fail every call — echo ok included — with the harness-internal
  
  "Failed to create streaming shell output" and never recover until the
  
  host was cleaned up. The spill is now best-effort (the bounded tail is
  
  still returned and the truncation notice says why the full-output path is
  
  missing), and any remaining spawn/stream failure names the exhausted
  
  resource — disk, file descriptors, memory — and says the next call is safe
  
  to retry (#5465; the wedge that took out the owner's own 0.9.9 session).


• A concrete route/offering output limit now outranks the conservative
  
  8,192-token compatibility guess for an uncatalogued model. Routes that
  
  publish no output limit remain fail-closed, documented model ceilings stay
  
  authoritative, and a route limit can never raise the requested cap (#5460).


• Context-window honesty at every surface (#5239, #5441): the
  
  model-name hint and fallback rungs of the context-window ladder are
  
  guesses, and every surface that renders one now says so — the status line,
  
  /status, /config, the context-pressure message, the model picker chips,
  
  and the auto-router inventory. Unverified windows still drive real budgets
  
  (compaction trigger, context meter, output reservation); they just stop
  
  reading as capabilities anyone checked. A window parsed from an _Nk
  
  model-name suffix (qwen3-32b-256k → 256K) is now its own
  
  model-name hint rung below catalog, because it is optimistic rather
  
  than conservative — a catalog or provider-reported value beats it. The
  
  [providers.<name>] context_window override remains the hard fix and
  
  renders as configured with no marker.


• Output-ceiling honesty (#5440): an Anthropic-family model the catalog does
  
  not describe keeps the 64K Messages floor as its clamp and the ChatGPT/
  
  Codex OAuth route keeps its 4K policy, but OutputCeilingSource gained an
  
  unverified rung for both, so exec-stream receipts and the model picker
  
  label them unverified/"assumed floor" instead of documented. Clamp
  
  values are unchanged.


• Telemetry default-on is visible (#5441): codewhale doctor's
  
  runtime-posture section gained a telemetry=on (default)-style row with
  
  the source that decided it (cli | env | config | default), and
  
  codewhale config get telemetry reports the resolved consent with its
  
  source instead of key not found on a machine whose batches ship. Truth
  
  change only; resolution and behavior are untouched.


• Fleet: a scout's read-only shell carve-out (#5428) is now honored by both
  
  the posture gate and the execution envelope, so git log, find | head,
  
  npm view and the other bounded read-only commands run in-place instead
  
  of being refused as "Executes" (#5426). Delegation still never widens
  
  authority: the role-isolation test and docs/SUBAGENTS.md pin that a child
  
  cannot exceed its parent's posture (#5426, #5435).


• /rename and /title now apply mid-first-turn: the session file does
  
  not exist until the first autosave, so the rename fell through with
  
  NotFound; the shared path now prefers the per-session checkpoint and
  
  rebuilds from App state, with a PTY regression test through the live
  
  event loop (#5430).


• integrations dsh plan no longer refuses DeepSeek's default
  
  Responses-dialect route (deepseek-v4-flash); Responses and
  
  Anthropic-Messages routes are carried through pi-ai
  
  openai-responses / anthropic-messages instead of being approximated
  
  or refused; only credentialed base URLs are still refused, with an error
  
  that names provider and model (#5434).


• Session cost no longer sits at unverified_live_pricing when live pricing
  
  cannot be verified (control-plane 503, Models.dev capabilities-only
  
  overlays): provider-docs bundled fallback rates for the DeepSeek V4
  
  family on Fireworks / OpenCode Zen restore a usable figure, live
  
  per-provider rows still win, and kimi-k3 stays unpriced until a
  
  published rate exists (#5241; harvested from #5402).


• Release assets: release.yml asset-freshness checks compare against the
  
  release job's own started_at, so job-level reruns of the npm step are no
  
  longer poisoned by earlier uploads (#5429).


• macOS CI: the agent_focus_pty auto-review receipt test waited on a
  
  worker that had already completed and raced the rail's focus; it now holds
  
  the child's wrap-up and waits for a settled live row (refs #5056, #5403).


• DeepSeek V4 pricing follows the published peak/off-peak tiers (peak
  
  01:00–04:00 and 06:00–10:00 UTC; off-peak is half of peak) for
  
  deepseek-v4-flash and deepseek-v4-pro in USD and CNY, resolved from
  
  each turn's recorded time; the stale single-tier rows understated cost up
  
  to ~4×. Because every direct DeepSeek first-party rate is now
  
  time-windowed, the scorecard fails closed (missing_recorded_time) on an
  
  undated DeepSeek turn instead of guessing a tier (#5470; #5241 follow-up,
  
  verified against api-docs.deepseek.com on 2026-08-17).


• SSE UTF-8 split across HTTP/2 DATA frames now fails closed in every
  
  streaming dialect: a shared strict decoder, tail flush, and
  
  decode_failed propagation (InvalidSseUtf8) replace the per-dialect
  
  approximations, with byte-chunk decoder tests (#5374; supersedes draft
  
  #5404).


• CI: release_four_read_only_fleet_roles_launch_with_canonical_prompts
  
  answered Fleet children with SSE while they call the blocking JSON path;
  
  the parse failure was retried and double-counted the worker on slow macOS
  
  runners (#5471; refs #5056).


• Context: every web tool surface (Web, web_search, web.run,
  
  fetch_url) now uses the noisy-result soft limit, so large fetches are
  
  compacted like shell output instead of consuming the ordinary hard limit
  
  (#5474, thanks @h3c-hexin).


• Routing: a lowercase saved selector such as glm-5.2 resolves against the
  
  owning Z.ai / DeepSeek catalog row (case-fold fallback, only when exactly
  
  one provider-owned wire id matches) instead of being classified as another
  
  provider's bare model (#5475, thanks @h3c-hexin; diagnosis by @asto18089
  
  in Pinvou#14).


• Model catalog brought current as of 2026-08-17 against the official
  
  pricing pages: gpt-5.6-terra / gpt-5.6-luna rates, claude-sonnet-5 keeps
  
  $2/$10 (the announced September increase was withdrawn), claude-opus-5
  
  added, kimi-k3 and kimi-k2.7-code-highspeed, MiniMax-M2.7-highspeed,
  
  Mistral first-party rows, xAI grok-4.5 / grok-4.3 with long-context
  
  tiers, Gemini and Qwen limits, and RedNote's dots3-note preview as an
  
  OpenRouter row (no first-party API exists yet) — every number carries its
  
  source and a pinned test (#5485).


• Website: copy on codewhale.net rewritten in plain declarative sentences —
  
  one idea per sentence, numbers from the generated facts, no self-narration
  
  — with a voice sheet at docs/design/WEB_VOICE.md (#5483).


• CI: the release workflows no longer restore npm/cargo caches after
  
  checking out a caller-supplied SHA — the CodeQL cache-poisoning Highs
  
  #88–#107 are closed with a contract test over the workflow files (#5463).


• Compact TUI rows below 60 columns no longer reserve a hidden session-metrics
  
  strip, so narrow terminals reclaim the row instead of clipping the
  
  transcript (#5486).


• Ghostty's truecolor underwater field now uses a dedicated synchronized
  
  60 FPS lane instead of the legacy 30 FPS compatibility cap, with continuous
  
  caustic fades replacing visibly stepped color changes.


• Live reasoning's advertised Space:expand action now runs before the
  
  composer's first-character paste-burst hold, while spaces in an active paste
  
  remain payload. The newest reasoning preview also spends only genuinely free
  
  viewport rows before truncating instead of stopping at the fixed 10/12-row
  
  fallback on roomy terminals.


• Strict cargo doc builds no longer fail on bare URLs in rustdoc comments;
  
  the remaining links are explicit Markdown targets (#5489).

Changed

• The model-facing agent tool advertises exactly 12 fields — action,
  
  prompt, type, profile, name, agent_id, message, until,
  
  detached, worktree, write_roots, resume_from — down from 33
  
  (#5324, refs #5123). Budgets (max_steps, wall_time_secs, max_depth),
  
  routing overrides (model, model_strength, thinking), worktree-path
  
  knobs, the deliberate/spawn-contract fields and the wait/status/interrupt
  
  extras moved off the advertised schema. Every removed field stays
  
  parse-accepted and honored unchanged (same contract as token_budget), so
  
  saved transcripts, ACP/MCP clients and Fleet configs replay as-is; the
  
  #5426/#5435 containment clamps are untouched. Child budgets now resolve
  
  from role defaults (60/120 turns, 1800 s wall time, unchanged clamps) and
  
  new [subagents] keys default_max_steps / default_wall_time_secs.
  
  Because the tool catalog is part of the session-pinned prompt prefix
  
  (docs/CACHE.md), upgrading re-fills the KV prefix once per session.


• TUI prose — user messages, assistant answers, and reasoning/thinking —
  
  now wraps at the full content width on wide terminals, matching
  
  tool/status cells, instead of stopping at a 105-column rail that left a
  
  dead right margin on ultrawide displays (#5436).


• Configured skill prompts are stable across session roots and operating
  
  systems: only custom configured roots hide their physical path, ordinary
  
  workspace/global skills keep a discoverable privacy-safe path, warning
  
  replacements are boundary-aware (including non-UTF-8 Unix paths), and
  
  Windows separators render as /. The skills prompt is also 50 bytes
  
  leaner without raising a runtime-contract ceiling (#5492, #5473).


• Auto-router classifier requests accept [auto.router] timeout_secs, while
  
  preserving the existing default when the key is absent (#5494).


• Every ci.yml job now has an explicit 10–90 minute timeout appropriate to
  
  its workload, bounding stale assigned runners instead of inheriting
  
  GitHub's six-hour default (#5495).


• The docs shell and shared web components now route localized copy through
  
  the typed dictionary spine; these are two incremental phases of #5337,
  
  not completion of the full epic (#5488, #5490).


• Dependency: rusqlite 0.40.2 (#5391).


• Documentation: stale A/B/C-tier references, provider defaults, module
  
  descriptions, and line anchors now match the current code (#5481).

Added

• [transcript] prose_measure (positive integer, optional): caps prose
  
  wrap at N columns for owners who want a bounded reading measure on
  
  ultrawide terminals. 0 or absent keeps the full width; negative or
  
  non-integer values are rejected with a clear config error. Tool, diff,
  
  and status cells never inherit the cap (#5436).


• Localization: README translations for Français, Deutsch, 繁體中文, हिन्दी,
  
  Türkçe, Italiano, Polski, العربية and Català join the existing nine
  
  (#5451); codewhale.net routes fr, de, ca, hi, tr, it, pl and ar (with
  
  dir="rtl" plumbing) as partial locales (#5453).


• Docs: README Integrations section (incl. the DeepSeek Harness dsh plugin
  
  path, docs/INTEGRATIONS_DSH.md) localized across all READMEs; RFC keeping
  
  the deterministic-first auto-review hybrid (#5427); Claude Code parity
  
  reference for agents/workflows/plugins/skills
  
  (docs/design/CLAUDE_CODE_PARITY.md); config.example.toml / SUBAGENTS.md /
  
  TOOL_LIFECYCLE.md brought back in line with the code (#5447).


• dsh integration: the Codewhale palette is applied through the bundle
  
  profile via dsh's documented overrideTokens (on by default;
  
  codewhale integrations dsh update --skin false turns it off), replacing
  
  the 0.9.8 exported-CSS skin that dsh's inline body variables overrode
  
  (docs/design/DSH_BUNDLE_SKIN.md, docs/INTEGRATIONS_DSH.md) (#5469).


• dsh integration: an ambient ocean scene behind the DSH web UI — slow
  
  whale silhouettes, a school of ><> glyph fish, bubbles — drawn on a
  
  canvas under a translucent veil of the Codewhale palette, plus an explicit
  
  responsive WHALE BROTHERS / CODEWHALE × DEEPSEEK HARNESS lockup; light
  
  and dark, ~30 fps capped, paused when hidden, a static frame under
  
  prefers-reduced-motion; on by default with the skin,
  
  codewhale integrations dsh update --ocean false turns it off (#5484).


• Fleet: agent shadowing is visible — a roster-row badge, a Layers block in
  
  agent detail, and a doctor "Fleet roster layers" section (JSON
  
  operate_fleet.roster.multi_layer), in all 15 TUI locales. Layer collapse
  
  and [fleet.profiles] migration stay for 0.9.10 (#5098).


• Sandbox: bwrap containers get the --dev/--proc/--tmpfs essentials plus
  
  configurable extra roots (bwrap_ro_roots / bwrap_dev_roots) so
  
  toolchains that live outside the workspace stay reachable read-only
  
  (#5410).


• Tests: crates/tui/tests/README.md states the keyless assembled-journey
  
  rule and maps the Auto-Review guardian acceptance items to the engine
  
  journeys that exercise them (#5361).


• OrcaRouter's default endpoint is classified as an aggregator billing
  
  surface, so pricing and session-cost reporting use the correct billing
  
  posture instead of treating it as a first-party provider (#5493).


• Dependencies: ratatui 0.30.2, thiserror 2.0.20.

Removed

• dsh integration: the exported-CSS skin file and its "skin export" status
  
  line (superseded by the bundle-applied overrideTokens skin, #5469).

Contributors

• hexin (@h3c-hexin) — a concrete route/offering output limit outranks the
  
  8,192-token compatibility guess for an uncatalogued model (#5461, closes
  
  #5460); web tool results use the noisy soft limit (#5474); owned direct
  
  model casing resolves safely (#5475); and configured-skill prompts stay
  
  stable across ephemeral roots and operating systems (#5492, #5473).


• Gabriel-Degret (@Gabriel-Degret) — configurable auto-router classifier
  
  timeout (#5494; first contribution).


• @asto18089 — diagnosed the Z.ai glm-5.2 casing collision and wrote the
  
  first provider-scoped fix in Pinvou#14 (carried upstream in
  
  #5475).


• Reports and reproductions that shaped this release: @hardy922 (context-
  
  window honesty, #5239), @redstar (bwrap extra roots, #5410), @all-lopezg
  
  (SSE UTF-8 garbling on DeepSeek Flash, #5374), @alitvak69 (unverified live
  
  pricing, #5241), and @wuisabel-gif (the macOS filtered-suite hang
  
  investigation on #5056).

See CHANGELOG.md for full notes and docs/CHANGELOG_ARCHIVE.md for older releases.