Codewhale v0.9.0

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 binaries)

npm install -g codewhale

The wrapper downloads the matched runtime 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:v0.9.0

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 codewhale-windows-x64.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

# Linux — individual binaries
sha256sum -c codewhale-artifacts-sha256.txt

# macOS
shasum -a 256 -c codewhale-bundles-sha256.txt
shasum -a 256 -c codewhale-artifacts-sha256.txt

What's in v0.9.0

Codewhale v0.9.0 replaces the default terminal shell with the underwater interaction system, makes Operate message-first, and hardens the Fleet, Workflow, routing, accounting, and release surfaces that support day-to-day agent work. The release also expands localization and gives the public site a quieter, docs-first community foundation. Its provider work replaces the old hand-maintained picker boundary with live ProviderLake discovery and adds the largest curated model-and-pricing expansion in the project so far.

Fixed — final integration

• Redact configured, environment, file-backed, and bare active credentials from every tool result before it crosses any model-provider wire protocol; retrieved spillover content is sanitized again at that boundary. The read_file tool also refuses CodeWhale configuration, backup, and credential-store paths, preventing routine tool use from exposing those local files.
• Keep immediate TUI submit failures inside the shell: custom-provider route preflight and closed-mailbox errors now restore the exact composer draft and selected skill for retry, with a sticky visible error instead of exiting.
• Anchor automatic compaction thresholds to the route's spendable input budget after output reservation and safety headroom, so large-output and tight self-hosted routes compact before provider context rejection. The TUI pre-send gate and warning copy now use the same token threshold as the engine. Preserve the 262K Kimi route's usable input budget and use the documented 32K default generation budget instead of mirroring the context window as output (#4293 by @SamhandsomeLee, #4368 by @bruce6135, and #4378 by @mvanhorn).
• Fail closed instead of reporting base-rate dollar estimates for direct OpenAI GPT-5.4/5.4 Pro, GPT-5.5 (including dated snapshots), and GPT-5.6 Sol/Terra/Luna requests above 272K input tokens. Exact tiered accounting remains deferred to the generalized pricing schema; smaller 5.4 variants, GPT-5.5 Pro, Codex subscription, and foreign-provider routes are unchanged (#4317).
• Retire deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner before they reach DeepSeek's first-party OpenAI or Anthropic wire APIs, migrating both to the documented deepseek-v4-flash replacement while preserving legacy non-thinking / thinking intent when no explicit reasoning tier is set. Aggregator, Wanjie Ark, self-hosted, and custom endpoint model ids remain provider-owned (#4320).
• Make Operate a message-first multitask surface: ordinary prompts work without a Workflow, direct parent tools follow the same approval, sandbox, shell, ask-rule, and repository protections as Act, and follow-ups can queue while work is active. Bounded background workers remain preferred for independent, parallel, isolated, or long-running work; child handoffs cannot inherit standing Full Access, and each dispatch produces one durable completion receipt.
• Let personal Fleet profiles in CODEWHALE_HOME/agents travel across repositories while project profiles in .codewhale/agents override them. Saving refreshes the live roster, and the UI now says explicitly that profile availability does not expand workspace, trust, or filesystem authority.
• Move file-mention discovery onto one bounded, generation-safe background worker so a slow filesystem read cannot freeze composer input. Exact paths resolve on send; fuzzy matches stay in the completion popup instead of silently attaching an arbitrary same-name file (#4365 by @WavesMan, with the initial bounded-walk approach from #4367 by @LeoLin990405).
• Keep the opt-in remember tool in the model-visible first-turn catalog so durable preference capture works without requiring a model to discover a tool it cannot yet know exists (#4373 by @Angel-Hair and #4377 by @mvanhorn).
• Make review handle a staged snapshot relative to a base ref by comparing the branch merge-base tree with the index. This preserves committed and staged branch work, excludes unstaged edits, and avoids the invalid git diff --cached <base>...HEAD form.

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