penguin-harness/changelog/0.2.1/RELEASE.md

PenguinHarness 0.2.1 — the desktop app arrives: the full Web experience as a double-click application for macOS, Windows and Linux, opening already signed in, with installers on the new download page and the OSS mirror.

Install

Desktop app (new): grab your platform's installer from penguin.ooo/download — served from the OSS mirror when it is reachable, GitHub otherwise. Current builds are unsigned: on first launch use right-click → Open on macOS, and "More info → Run anyway" past Windows SmartScreen.

CLI / server (Linux, macOS; bundled Node runtime):

curl -fsSL https://penguin.ooo/install.sh | sh
penguin web

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://penguin.ooo/install.ps1 | iex
penguin web

Or via npm (needs Node >= 24):

npm install -g @prismshadow/penguin-cli

Highlights

The desktop app. A thin Electron shell over the unchanged server and Web App: it forks the server on the shared ~/.penguin/data root, opens its window already signed in — no terminal, no login page, no initial password — and everything still flows through the same HTTP API (no preload, no node integration). A per-root single-instance lock keeps the schedule scheduler and web.db single-writer safe across the shell and CLI alike; if a CLI-started server is already up, the app attaches to it. UI preferences survive restarts via a stable window origin (the shell reuses last launch's port when still free). Installers: macOS dmg (Apple silicon / Intel), Windows NSIS, Linux AppImage / deb.

A download page with mirror-aware links. penguin.ooo/download shows one card per platform with your OS badged. Buttons start on GitHub's static releases/latest/download links — installers now carry version-less names, which is what makes those links possible — and swap to the OSS mirror's immutable per-tag URLs once the bucket's latest.json resolves in the browser, with a manual source toggle and checksum links. Desktop installers are mirrored to OSS alongside the CLI bundles.

Download source selection everywhere. Standalone install.sh / install.ps1 gain the forwarder's OSS-first selection (PENGUIN_DOWNLOAD_SOURCE=auto|oss|github) with immutable Release-tag stamping, so a saved versioned installer downloads exactly its matching package forever. penguin update adopts the same contract: OSS latest.json discovery with a same-tag GitHub fallback in auto, strict forced modes, explicit HTTPS mirror precedence, and localized failure messages.

Compaction failures fixed — and visible. Models that mangle the [summary] format no longer trap a session in a failing-compaction loop (#170): extraction applies a tolerance ladder, an unusable response retries on the standard backoff budget with a corrective note, and the burned attempts and tokens finally show up in stats and the cost center, with one shared retry-detail shape across the CLI and Web.

Notable in this release

• Login hardened. The fixed penguin-2026 seed admin password is replaced by a random one printed once at first start, and the login endpoint gains per-username exponential throttling.
• Skills manageable in the app. Agent settings gains a Skills tab (list from disk, uninstall, zip import/export, chat-driven install), agent-list icons deep-link to settings tabs, and the new skill-porting library skill brings skills in from other ecosystems; data-analysis moves to v2 with a leaner multi-run evaluation flow.
• New chat defaults per Project. Default agent, working directory, approval mode, thinking level and model, seeded into new drafts.
• A Traces page that scales. Shared sidebar grouping components, workspace/agent grouping, server-side session paging, and a SQLite-derived mtime-reconciled trace index replacing per-request filesystem walks.
• Chat refinements. The conversation outline rail windows to ±20 turns and stops overlapping the composer, the cost stat stays put across task boundaries, uploaded file attachments render as user content (and inside steering chips), tool rows drop [failed]-style text markers, and ANSI color no longer leaks into tool output.
• Server IO hotspots closed. The scheduler tick and schedules routes serve from mtime-gated caches, and GET /messages gains cursor pagination with tail-first web loading.
• Dependencies. hono bumped past the CORS-preflight ReDoS advisory (GHSA-8j4g-w8fx-2239); OpenRouter catalog gains qwen/qwen3.8-max.

Requirements

Linux or macOS (x64 / arm64), or Windows 10+ (x64). The desktop app and the CLI installers bundle their own runtime; installing from npm needs Node >= 24. All data stays under ~/.penguin/data.

Full detail: changelog/0.2.1/.