Nanocoder v1.26.0 Release Notes — What's New

What's Changed

BREAKING: Removed redundant nanocoderTools.alwaysAllow setting. It duplicated the top-level alwaysAllow with no extra behaviour. Move any entries from nanocoderTools.alwaysAllow to the top-level alwaysAllow array in agents.config.json. The deprecated agents.config.example.json has also been removed.
Added nano mode — a third tool profile under /tune designed for the smallest open-weights models or low-end hardware running larger models locally. Strictly more aggressive than minimal: drops find_files, list_directory, and agent; trims CORE PRINCIPLES and CODING PRACTICES; uses ≤4-line TASK APPROACH, FILE OPERATIONS, and CONSTRAINTS sections; replaces the verbose SYSTEM INFORMATION block with a single-line ## SYSTEM line; and omits AGENTS.md from the prompt by default. Brings the system prompt from ~500–700 tokens (minimal) down to ~150–250 tokens. Includes a new "Nano (low-end hardware)" preset and an Include AGENTS.md toggle.
Added reasoning trace support. Reasoning content from models (Codex GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1-style, Anthropic extended thinking, etc.) now streams in real time, renders as a collapsible Thought block above the response, persists across history, and is included in logs. Toggle expansion with Ctrl+R, configure default expansion via the new Display Settings panel, and pin per-session via the tune expandedReasoning option. <think> tags are now stripped on the native tool-calling path so reasoning never leaks into rendered output. Thanks to @Daniel5055. Closes #457.
Added refined non-interactive mode. A new --plain flag streams output suitable for CI pipelines, scripts, and pipes — no Ink rendering, no interactive prompts, deterministic exit codes, and proper handling of stdin/stdout. Includes a dedicated non-interactive-shell component and full test coverage for the plain transport.
Reworked VS Code extension integration. Removed the "Ask Nanocoder" command in favour of a more natural flow: highlighted text and the currently focused file are automatically pulled into Nanocoder as context. Backed by a rewritten extension protocol, a simplified extension entrypoint, a new useVSCodeServer hook, and tighter UI hooks for the development mode indicator and chat input.
Added /rename command for renaming the current chat session. Accessible from the chat input and reflected in the development mode indicator. Thanks to @lordoski.
Added defaultMode config option for interactive sessions. Set a starting mode (normal, auto-accept, yolo, plan) in agents.config.json instead of always launching in normal mode. Thanks to @lordoski.
Added custom system prompt support via agents.config.json. Define a project-level system prompt that replaces or augments the built-in prompt sections, with full validation and prompt-builder integration. Closes #487.
Added per-provider and per-model context window overrides in agents.config.json via contextWindow and contextWindows[model]. New resolution order: session override (/context-max, --context-max) → provider model override → provider default → NANOCODER_CONTEXT_LIMIT → models.dev / Ollama fallback. /usage, status bar, auto-compact, and context reporting all use the active provider config consistently. Closes #455.
Added subagent context window overrides so delegated agents can run with a different context limit than the main session. Thanks to @zerone0x.
Added disabledTools config option in agents.config.json to disable specific built-in tools project-wide. Honoured by both the main agent and subagents.
Added --trust-directory CLI flag to bypass the first-run directory trust prompt for automation. Yolo mode now also skips file path validators in line with its "auto-accept everything" semantics.
Added JSON tool fallback mode for non-tool-calling open-weights models (Qwen, Kimi, GLM). The tune menu now cycles through Native ON / OFF (XML) / OFF (JSON), with formatToolsForJSONPrompt() embedding literal JSON Schema and a JSON branch in the tool-call parser. Native path also gains JSON/XML hallucination recovery: parseToolCalls() is run against text content when the SDK reports no tool_calls, and stripEmbeddedToolCallText() removes echoed tool-call text so Ghost Echo no longer leaks into the UI or history. Reference #500.
Added <function=...> format to the tool-call parser for models that emit OpenAI-style function tags.
Added Display Settings panel under /settings ("Tool Results and Thinking") with two new toggles: Show Thinking by default (Ctrl+R) and Expand Tool Results by default (Ctrl+O), persisted to nanocoder-preferences.json. Thanks to @cleyesode. Closes #499.
Added 12+ new themes to the bundled theme set.
Removed the in-repo release content generator workflow. Release content is now generated from another repo via ContentForest.
Bumped CI and devcontainer toolchain to Node.js 22 + pnpm 11 across pr-checks.yml, release.yml, update-badges.yml, and .devcontainer/Dockerfile. engines.node raised to >=22, with a packageManager field (pnpm@11.x.x) added to package.json so Corepack pins the pnpm version automatically for both contributors and CI — no more drift, no per-workflow version: lines. CONTRIBUTING.md / docs/getting-started/installation.md / .devcontainer/README.md updated to match. Fixes the node:sqlite ERR_UNKNOWN_BUILTIN_MODULE crash hit by pnpm 11 on Node 20 runners.
Migrated pnpm config from package.json to pnpm-workspace.yaml for pnpm 11 compatibility: overrides, patchedDependencies, and the new allowBuilds block now live in the workspace file. While migrating, audited and removed all 16 existing version overrides — every one was redundant under current dependency resolution (each transitive resolved to a version already exceeding the override's floor), and removing them left pnpm audit output unchanged.
Major spring-clean refactor across the codebase. Extracted shared oauth-login command from the duplicated codex-login and copilot-login flows; introduced shared item-selector component used by model-selector and provider-selector; centralised tool-needs-approval logic; moved AI SDK error-handling specs into a dedicated subdirectory; tightened logging method factory; and trimmed redundant code paths in conversation-loop, subagent-executor, and the plain shell.
Refactored App.tsx and added missing test coverage for the app container and chat input components.
Refactored settings theme selector UX. Replaced the scrollable SelectInput with arrow-key navigation, real-time theme preview, and a "Theme Name [n/N]" position indicator. Preferences are only persisted on Enter.
Updated the system prompt to encourage subagent use more proactively for complex multi-step tasks.
Strip leading and trailing whitespace from assistant messages so blank lines and stray newlines from the model no longer push content around in the UI.
Fix: Empty model responses now trigger a capped auto-continue instead of crashing or burning tokens forever. Empty-response retry notices are coalesced into a single live counter so the chat history stays readable.
Fix: Surface context-size failures explicitly instead of silently retrying empty responses. Thanks to @zerone0x. Closes #501.

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