Minor
v0.2.0
Two hundred and twenty commits since v0.1.62. The agent got smaller and more honest, the transcript got readable, and updates now come from our own feed.
The tool surface: 118 became 16
A long tool list does not sit quietly in the model's context — it competes for attention, and past about twenty definitions the model starts picking a plausible wrong one or inventing a name. Thirty-four of ours were shell wrappers, and a model drives a shell from training rather than from sixteen descriptions it has to read first.
- The git, gh, npm, tsc, eslint, format, LSP, snapshot, memory and index tools
are gone.
execute_commandreplaced all of them. search_codeworks with no key of anybody's: the embedder now follows the keys that exist instead of defaulting to one nobody had.read_filereturns a window with a map — 500 lines plus the file's symbol outline — instead of a 17,000-token dump.update_plancame back, because the harness could not see a plan written in prose. The transcript row is the tool call.sessionslets a chat read and message the app's other chats.- A registry test fails above twenty tools, so adding one back is a decision rather than a side effect.
The transcript reads like a record of work
- One line per step, folded into a run with a sentence that says what happened: "Ran 3 commands (1 failed), read 2 files".
- Repeated calls collapse into one row with a count, and a repeat that was failing is marked — the loop is the finding.
- Short thoughts ride as a chip on the step they led to; long reasoning keeps its words.
- A run past eight steps windows down, and Inspect opens the whole truth in the rail.
- The plan docks over the composer; the answer stands before the receipts.
Updates come from our own feed
- The updater reads
updates.vellumcode.comrather than a public GitHub repo, which keeps real client IPs in the logs and lets the feed file carryno-storewhile installers stay immutable. - Release notes travel inside the feed, so the update modal is never blank.
- CI dropped macOS — ten times the minutes for an installer Gatekeeper blocks — and the Linux checks moved to a self-hosted runner.
The CLI is a real package
npm i -g vellum-code now works: the published package ships a bundle, because
Node refuses to strip types under node_modules. vellum task gained the
subagents it was missing, and background commands work without a terminal
emulator.
The model is told the truth more often
- One behaviour contract written three ways — terse for Claude, explicit for OpenAI, spelled out for open-weights models.
- The system prompt splits into a cacheable half and a per-turn half, so the ~4,100-token prefix stops being re-evaluated every turn.
- A tool call the model typed in its chat template's syntax now runs as the call it is.
- A SEARCH that matches twice edits nothing and says so; a failed SEARCH says where the file actually differs; CRLF checkouts match.
- A model repeating itself is stopped instead of streamed for an hour.
- Edit-time diagnostics for every language with a server, not just TypeScript.
- Compaction prunes on an absolute token floor, not only a fill ratio, and hands its casualties to the read-before-edit tracker.
Fixes worth naming
- A rebuilt agent came back with no memory of the conversation — a model switch made it answer as if the chat had just begun.
- Stopping a background session left its process running, so a dev server kept its port after the tool said it was stopped.
- A search engine's bot challenge was read as an empty web, and the agent gave up and guessed a URL.
- A project folder that is gone says so instead of throwing.
- Every project-less chat gets its own sandbox instead of sharing one folder.