Codewhale v0.9.2

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 (#1186, PR #4960 by @greyfreedom).

• /preview-request (aliases /dryrun and /preview_request) is a human-only, provider-free inspection of the next primary turn. Production dispatch and preview share one prepared-request seam across Chat Completions, Anthropic Messages, and OpenAI Responses, so the manifest reads the final wire model, reasoning controls, tool choice, tool schemas, and body hash from the same value production sends. Route, tool, or body facts that require Auto's provider classifier, an MCP connection, mutable hooks, compaction, or queued runtime injections remain typed unavailable. The manifest reports exact primary role/lane identity, upstream route-source provenance, requested and effective reasoning, canonical JSON sizes, conservative offline estimates, and provider-reported usage as unavailable because no request ran. It never adds a model-visible tool, sends a provider call, or prints prompt, message, credential, endpoint-path, or workspace-path content. The explicit /preview-request base-prompt

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