Codewhale v0.9.9

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

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