Codewhale v0.9.10

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:v0.9.10

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, codew.exe, and codewhale.bat under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\CodeWhale\bin, adds that directory to the current-user PATH, and creates a Start Menu shortcut that prefers Windows Terminal (wt.exe) when it is installed.
• Extract the archive for your machine: codewhale-windows-x64.zip or codewhale-windows-arm64.zip
• Double-click codewhale.bat (not the raw .exe) to launch
• Run install.bat to copy the binaries and launcher to %USERPROFILE%\bin
• Add %USERPROFILE%\bin to your PATH

The portable Windows archive skips the install script — extract and run codewhale.bat 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 v0.9.10

• Show the full slash-command or /model completion row in a bounded, wrapping hover popover whenever narrow terminals truncate it, closing the remaining scoped gap from #998. Thanks @AiurArtanis and @formp3 for identifying the affected surfaces.
• registry_sync no longer ships the full MCP Registry catalog into the conversation. It takes a required query, scores the local snapshot host-side, and returns at most eight matches; the complete catalog stays on disk, and the compaction and spillover exemptions that let a multi-hundred- kilobyte dump reach the model unchanged are gone.
• Providers that mirror the outgoing (reasoning omitted) replay placeholder back as a reasoning delta no longer have that echo ingested as real thinking: the exact transport placeholder is dropped on arrival, so live sessions stop showing a stream of placeholder reasoning blocks and saved transcripts stay free of them.
• Mid-stream connection drops during an interactive turn no longer persist a synthetic [runtime] user message. Retry state is a typed engine-internal descriptor; a thinking-only drop re-issues the request without claiming a partial reply was preserved, the retry budget is enforced in mechanism, and recovery produces exactly one authoritative final answer.

Codewhale v0.9.10 is a retention, identity, and product-clarity release: the shell and transcript can no longer retain unbounded tool output in memory or on disk, mid-turn history inserts no longer strand in-flight tool rows, every agent that ran this session is visible from /agents list, the PTY acceptance lane has a stall watchdog and bounded CI steps, approval outcomes are durable and fail closed (cyq1017, #5360), and three $HOME disk leaks are reclaimed. Extension surfaces now name their real state and act only through the reviewed install and trust flows, and sub-agent, shell, task, and workflow state is owned by the session that created it (#5518). Test threads get an 8 MiB stack so the lib suite can no longer abort under load.

Fixed

• First run starts on the welcome screen again. A missing key no longer skips Welcome and auto-opens the local-provider list: Enter walks to the calm provider explanation, then Enter opens the picker so a first API key can be set. Returning missing-key recovery still opens the picker on launch.
• A foreground bash command that named no timeout is bounded again. The model-facing bash tool left an omitted timeout_ms at the internal ceiling (~24.8 days) instead of the 120 s default its own schema advertises, so a CLI that blocked on an interactive prompt or a hung network call held the turn open indefinitely — one report sat on a single unauthenticated CLI call for over two hours with the tool row simply counting seconds. The advertised default now applies, which arms the existing recovery: the process is killed and the model is told to rerun with background=true and poll with action="wait". An explicit timeout_ms is still honored for genuinely long foreground work, and background and interactive runs keep their own lifetimes.
• The Extensions (/plugin

…