What's new in Houston

Houston 0.4.19

Two alpha-feedback fixes on top of v0.4.18.

Fixed

• Integrations tab now opens the right Composio page. Clicking an app in the Integrations tab (Google Calendar, Gmail, etc.) used to open https://dashboard.composio.dev/~/connect/apps/<app>. The ~ is supposed to resolve to the user's default Composio workspace, but at least one real alpha user landed on a workspace-less page that did nothing. The button now routes through Composio's marketing site with a Houston-tagged fragment (the same URL pattern the tutorial chat card already uses), and Composio handles the auth and workspace routing for us.

Changed

• OpenAI model picker now shows two options. GPT-5.5 Codex (new default) and GPT-5.5 (the existing flagship). Codex is the model the OpenAI Codex CLI was built around and is tuned for the tool-use / agent workload Houston actually runs — reading your calendar, drafting email replies, editing files. The tutorial now defaults to it when you choose OpenAI as the provider, which should reduce the rate at which the tutorial stalled at the completion token on plain gpt-5.5. Plain gpt-5.5 stays available in the picker for users who prefer the general chat model.

Before you upgrade

• Mac: quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Windows x64: auto-update from 0.4.7 or later pulls you forward automatically. The MSI is still not OS-code-signed (SignPath integration is still pending).
• Windows ARM64: there is no auto-update path from an emulated x64 install. Download the ARM64 MSI manually, uninstall the x64 build first, then install the ARM64 one.

Known limitations

• Windows MSI not yet OS-code-signed. SignPath integration still pending.
• "Continue with Microsoft" sign-in for Houston itself remains hidden while we reconcile the Supabase Azure provider with the production callback URL. Google sign-in is unaffected.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups.

Houston 0.4.16

Five fixes from a tight alpha-feedback loop on v0.4.15 Windows. The big one is sessions now persist across app close on Windows.

Fixed

• Sessions now persist across app close on Windows. On v0.4.10 through v0.4.15, every alpha user got forced to sign in again on every single Houston launch. Their session was being installed in supabase's in-memory state on each sign-in, but the write to disk was silently failing under the hood. Root cause is a Windows Credential Manager limit: the credential blob is capped at about 2.5 KB, and a Supabase session payload (the JWT, the user info, the refresh token, the provider token) lands around 3 to 4 KB. CredWrite was returning an error every time, and our storage layer was swallowing it. Houston now writes the session to a per-user, DPAPI-encrypted file under %LOCALAPPDATA%\com.houston.app\auth\ instead, which has no size limit and still binds the encrypted file to your Windows user account. Sign in once and you stay signed in. macOS Keychain users see no change.
• Storage errors are no longer silent. The same defect above stayed invisible for weeks because our storage layer caught and discarded any failure. It does not anymore: a real toast surfaces if anything goes wrong with reading or writing the encrypted session, so we hear about it the same day instead of weeks later.
• "Send logs to support" button on the sign-in screen. Alpha users who got stuck on sign-in had no way to reach the in-app Report Bug flow (it lives inside Settings, which is behind sign-in). The sign-in screen now has a small "Stuck? Send logs to support / ¿Atascado? Enviar logs a soporte" link that ships the latest logs straight to our support pipeline with a fixed "stuck on sign-in" description. Non-technical users no longer need a PowerShell one-liner to get help.
• "Skip tutorial" escape hatch on the Try-a-mission step. The tutorial relies on the agent emitting a literal [TUTORIAL_COMPLETE] token at the end of its structured plan to advance. Codex with gpt-5.5 sometimes wraps the token in markdown, escapes the underscore, or just declines to emit it at all, and users sat on the same screen for minutes. A small "Skip tutorial / Saltar tutorial" link in the left panel of M3 stops the in-flight session and jumps straight into the workspace.
• Tutorial completion detector is lenient about formatting. The detector was a strict literal match. It now accepts every shape gpt-5.5 actually produces: markdown-bolded brackets, escaped underscores, whitespace inside the brackets, "COMPLETED" instead of "COMPLETE", and any casing. The display-stripping pass uses the same lenient regex so the marker never leaks into the final card.

Before you upgrade

• Mac: quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Windows x64: auto-update from 0.4.7 or later pulls you forward automatically. The MSI is still not OS-code-signed (SignPath integration is still pending), so expect one SmartScreen "Run anyway" prompt on first install.
• Windows ARM64: there is no auto-update path from an emulated x64 install. Download the ARM64 MSI manually, uninstall the x64 build first, then install the ARM64 one. Future ARM64 to ARM64 updates apply automatically.

Note for Windows users upgrading from 0.4.15 or earlier

Your previous session is not migrated. The old Credential Manager entries are abandoned (they never had a complete session to begin with). Sign in once after upgrading and you stay signed in from then on.

Known limitations

• Windows MSI not yet OS-code-signed. SignPath integration still pending. One SmartScreen "Run anyway" click on first install only, both x64 and ARM64.
• "Continue with Microsoft" sign-in for Houston itself remains hidden while we reconcile the Supabase Azure provider with the production callback URL. Google sign-in is unaffected. The Microsoft 365 + Outlook tutorial path is unaffected.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.9

A polish pass on the first-run tutorial. The "Plan my next working day" mission now runs noticeably faster, works for Microsoft accounts, and finishes on a full-bleed report screen instead of an easy-to-miss card in the chat split. No engine changes, no breaking changes. Drop-in on top of 0.4.8.

What's new

• Provider choice on the tutorial mission. The agent now asks "Google or Microsoft?" and binds Gmail + Calendar or Outlook + Outlook Calendar accordingly at runtime. Microsoft 365 users are no longer pushed through a Google-only flow.
• Tutorial mission is faster. Instead of dispatching two subagents and waiting on each, the agent reads your calendar and your 20 most recent emails inline as parallel tool calls in the same turn. Reply drafts are created the same way: three drafts, one turn, three parallel tool calls. End-to-end the AHA reaches "drafts ready in your inbox" in roughly half the time of 0.4.8.
• No more Sheets step + no follow-up email back to you. The 4-tab Google Sheet and the post-mission email are gone. The agent now produces a single structured chat reply with bold "Don't miss / Your day / Worth replying / Your commitments" sections, in your language, and leaves the actual reply drafts sitting in your inbox where you'd reply from anyway.
• Full-bleed success screen. The agent's final report renders on its own screen with a sticky-footer "Enter Houston" CTA, instead of a card inside the chat split. Much harder to miss the next-step button.

Before you upgrade

• Mac: quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Windows: auto-update from 0.4.7 or 0.4.8 should pull you forward automatically. The MSI is still not OS-code-signed (SignPath is still pending). One SmartScreen "Run anyway" prompt on first install only.

If you are on 0.4.5 or later

Houston should detect 0.4.9, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier (Mac)

Auto-update will not pull you forward from those builds. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are back on the healthy updater path and future versions apply automatically.

Known limitations

• Windows ARM64 not yet shipped. v0.4.9 is x64-only on Windows.
• Windows MSI not yet OS-code-signed. SignPath integration still pending. One SmartScreen "Run anyway" click on first install only.
• "Continue with Microsoft" sign-in for Houston itself remains hidden while we reconcile the Supabase Azure provider with the production callback URL. Note: this is the Houston app login, separate from the Microsoft 365 + Outlook tutorial path that this release adds. Google sign-in is unaffected.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.8

The "tutorial demo that actually lands" release. The first-run flow now opens with a single, repeatable mission, "Plan my next working day", that exercises Gmail, Calendar, and Sheets in parallel and finishes with a 4-tab Google Sheet plus a follow-up email. No more morning-only chips that felt broken at evening demos. The success card has been re-skinned with the same running-glow comet border the Activity Board uses, so the next-step CTA actually gets clicked. Plus a real fix for the silent zero-result you'd see when installing certain skill repos.

What's new

• Single, parallel-tools tutorial mission. The 6 personal-assistant chips ("morning brief", "meeting prep", "weekly recap", etc.) are gone. The new flow uses one "Plan my next working day" mission that runs two subagents in parallel against Gmail + Calendar + Sheets, cross-references their results for the "I didn't notice this" moment, and produces a real 4-tab Google Sheet (Schedule / Replies needed / Commitments / Don't miss) plus a sent follow-up email. Re-runnable any day, every day, regardless of what time you open the app.
• Comet-glow success card. The end-of-tutorial card now wears the same animated card-running-glow border the Activity Board uses for in-flight missions. People were missing the success card and the "start the tour" CTA on it; the comet treatment fixes that.
• Repos with a single root SKILL.md install correctly. Skills like refero_skill (underscore in the repo name) or any repo whose canonical skill is at the root would silently install zero skills with no error. Now they install. Skill authors' declared name: in frontmatter is preserved as the slug; we no longer overwrite it with a slugified version of the repo name.
• Skill install failures are visible. Errors from the install path no longer get swallowed by an internal tracing::warn! and turned into "installed 0 skills". They propagate up and render in the dialog as real error copy, so when something fails you can actually see why.
• Download for Windows on the website. The marketing site has a "Download for Windows" button next to the Mac download in the hero and pricing card. Clicking opens a beta-disclosure modal with a button to join the Windows waitlist (same form as the Mac one). Doesn't change the app itself, but it's how we'll size Windows demand in PostHog.

Reliability

• No silent failures, codified. Houston's CLAUDE.md now bans the patterns that produced the "installed 0 skills" bug, namely catching errors with tracing::warn! and returning Ok, plus let _ = x.await for ops that can fail. New code in the engine has to surface failures through ? to the route layer. We're going to be auditing the rest of the codebase against this rule over the next releases.

Before you upgrade

• Mac: quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Windows: auto-update from 0.4.7 should pull you forward automatically. The MSI is still not OS-code-signed (SignPath is still pending). One SmartScreen "Run anyway" prompt on first install only.

If you are on 0.4.5 or later

Houston should detect 0.4.8, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier (Mac)

Auto-update will not pull you forward from those builds. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are back on the healthy updater path and future versions apply automatically.

Known limitations

• Windows ARM64 not yet shipped. v0.4.8 is x64-only on Windows.
• Windows MSI not yet OS-code-signed. SignPath integration still pending. One SmartScreen "Run anyway" click on first install only.
• "Continue with Microsoft" sign-in remains hidden while we reconcile the Supabase Azure provider with the production callback URL. Google sign-in is unaffected.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.7

The reliability follow-up to 0.4.6. Everything that landed last week, the tutorial, the settings rail, the integrations sign-in card, gets hardened against real-world flakiness here. Connect cards no longer get stuck. The skills marketplace stops freezing on a single search. The guided tour now actually walks you through the workspace tabs instead of just pointing at them. Plus a few coming-soon provider cards in the brain picker so you can see what's next.

What's new

• Connect cards in chat actually finish. The previous spinner could get stuck for minutes when Composio's consumer-connections endpoint lagged or returned a different slug shape than the one we expected. Three things fixed this together: the engine now pushes a ComposioConnectionAdded event the moment it sees the connection on the backend (no more polling roulette), every visible "not connected" card now refreshes itself on focus and on a 10s heartbeat (catches connections you make outside the chat, in another agent, or on the CLI), and 6 seconds after you click Connect the spinner becomes an "I've connected" button you can click to force a refresh. No more "stuck until restart".
• Skills marketplace is responsive again. Searching skills.sh would freeze the dialog any time the network call took longer than a keystroke, because every search shared one mutex. Each query now runs independently. Opening the dialog uses a separate cached "popular" feed so your first keystroke is never blocked behind a network call. Errors are now typed and explained in plain English (rate-limited / offline / repo private / repo missing / malformed skill) instead of "something went wrong" plus a console log.
• Guided tour walks you through the tabs. Each tour step now actually switches to the matching tab (Activity, Routines, Files, Job Description, Mission Control) before spotlighting it, so you see what the tab looks like, not just the trigger that opens it. Two new steps: spotlight the "add agent" button, then open the New Agent dialog and spotlight the store grid so you can see what installing an agent looks like. New "Back" button so you can step backward, and a closing "Now go build something amazing" outro.
• Integrations provider is now anonymized in the UI. Onboarding, the integrations tab, and the inline chat sign-in card now say "integrations provider" instead of "Composio" (Composio is mentioned only as the default provider). Backend, agent system prompts, internal identifiers, and the bundled CLI are unchanged, this is purely user-facing copy. We expect to add more integration providers in the future.
• More providers visible in the brain picker. Gemini, SubQ, DeepSeek, and MiniMax show up as "Coming soon" cards alongside OpenAI and Anthropic in the onboarding brain mission and the settings provider picker. Brand SVGs for the real ones, a monogram for SubQ. Cards are non-clickable until those providers are wired up.

Reliability

• Search dialog seeds without blocking your keystrokes. Opening the skills dialog used to fire a fake search("ai") that competed with whatever you typed for the same lock. Removed. Popular feed is now cached for 24h and renders instantly.
• AbortController everywhere in skills. Each keystroke aborts the prior in-flight request, so racing search calls don't paint stale results.
• Stable error tags on the wire. The engine now exposes typed error.kind strings (e.g. repo_private, github_rate_limited, skill_malformed) so the UI can map specific failures to actionable copy without parsing message strings.

Before you upgrade

• Mac: quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Windows: auto-update from 0.4.6 should pull you forward automatically. The MSI is still not OS-code-signed (SignPath ships in a follow-up); first-time installers will see one SmartScreen "Run anyway" prompt.

If you are on 0.4.5 or 0.4.6

Houston should detect 0.4.7, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier (Mac)

Auto-update will not pull you forward from those builds. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are back on the healthy updater path and future versions apply automatically.

Known limitations

• Windows ARM64 not yet shipped. v0.4.7 is x64-only on Windows.
• Windows MSI not yet OS-code-signed. SignPath Foundation integration is still pending. One SmartScreen "Run anyway" click on first install only.
• "Continue with Microsoft" sign-in remains hidden while we reconcile the Supabase Azure provider with the production callback URL. Google sign-in is unaffected.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.6

The "first run that feels like a game" release. Houston now opens with a guided tutorial that gets a brand-new user from cold app launch to a real, working assistant in under a minute, no form-filling, no docs. This is also the first cut that ships natively on Windows, the first one with a real Settings rail, the first one with a Sign-out button on connected providers, and the first one with the Outbound cold-email agent in the store.

What's new

• Video-game-style first-run tutorial. Replaces the old form-based onboarding with a guided flow: name your assistant, sign in to your AI provider, sign in to Composio so the agent has tools, then run a real chat against it. The "Try it" mission isn't a demo, it kicks off a real mission via the same chat surface used everywhere else, so the conversation lives on the Activity board and survives once the tutorial is done. Predefined chips (morning brief, meeting prep, weekly recap) make the first message zero-effort.
• Inline Composio sign-in card in chat. When the agent tries to call a tool that needs Composio and you're not signed in, it posts a connect card directly in the conversation. One click, you're authenticated, the agent retries. Mirrors the existing per-toolkit connect-card pattern so users never get bounced out to Settings to recover.
• Workspace UI tour. After graduation, a coachmark tour walks you through the agents area, tabs (Activity, Routines, Files, Job Description), Mission Control, Integrations, and the new "Guide me" pill in the tab bar. Replayable any time from that pill.
• Settings has a proper sidebar. The long-scrolling settings page is gone. Account, Workspace, Provider, Appearance, Language, Timezone, Connect phone, and Danger zone each live in their own section with one-click left-rail navigation.
• Sign out from Codex and Claude Code. Connected provider cards now have a "Sign out" link. It runs the official CLI logout command (claude auth logout clears the macOS Keychain entry, codex logout revokes the ChatGPT refresh token server-side), then re-surfaces the login flow inline.
• Outbound agent in the store. A new agent that runs the LinkedIn to Apollo to Instantly cold-email pipeline end-to-end. Find leads on LinkedIn, enrich via Apollo, send via Instantly, all from one chat.
• Connect phone moved into Settings. The phone-pairing QR, connection state, and the disconnect-all-phones reset now live together inside Settings under a BETA pill, instead of hanging off the global sidebar.
• Improved agent sidebar. Sidebar item rows pick up the work refactor from the new SidebarSectionNav, with cleaner spacing and active-state treatment.

Native Windows build

• Houston for Windows ships as a signed-by-minisign MSI installer alongside the Mac DMG. Same agent, same engine, same chat surface. Composio, codex, and claude-code all run as native Windows executables. No WSL, no Docker, no terminal anywhere in the install or first-run path.
• In-app auto-update on Windows. Once you're on a Houston for Windows build, future versions arrive the same way they do on Mac: a notification in the app, one click to install, automatic relaunch.
• Windows first-run hardening. Sign-in opens the OAuth URL through cmd /C start instead of macOS open (Windows users could not get past the sign-in screen before). The engine spawns with CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP so the parent app's console events stop killing the subprocess every couple of minutes (STATUS_CONTROL_C_EXIT). The bundled CLI resolver knows the MSI install layout, so claude-code and composio are found instead of silently skipped. Composio's first-time login writes your API key to the Windows Credential Manager via the same FFI-against-native-APIs pattern Houston uses on the macOS Keychain. No plaintext on disk.
• Project moved to the gethouston org. github.com/ja-818/houston is now github.com/gethouston/houston. The old URL still redirects, so existing clones, forks, and updater endpoints keep working.

Reliability

• Sessions no longer die at the first message when an unrelated copy of Claude Code lives elsewhere on your computer. Houston now talks directly to the version it manages itself, which is always kept in sync with what Houston was tested against. Previously, an older claude install on the same machine could intercept the call and reject newer flags, surfacing as a vague "app error."
• Auth errors are actually visible. Sign-in surfaces post-callback OAuth failures inline with human-readable messages (the common AADSTS codes plus Supabase identity-collision errors are mapped to actionable sentences) instead of silently logging.
• Updater uses the same minisign signing key for both OSes. The signing key controls who can ship updates to existing Houston installs, regardless of platform.

Before you upgrade

• Mac: quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Windows (first install): the MSI is not yet OS-code-signed (SignPath integration ships in a follow-up). You'll see a SmartScreen warning the first time. Click "More info" then "Run anyway." Once installed, future auto-updates run from a trusted parent process and don't show the warning.

If you are on 0.4.4 or 0.4.5 (Mac)

Houston should detect 0.4.6, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier (Mac)

Auto-update will not pull you forward from those builds. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are back on the healthy updater path and future versions apply automatically.

Known limitations

• Windows ARM64 not yet shipped. v0.4.6 is x64-only on Windows. ARM64 (Surface Pro X, etc.) is on the roadmap once we have demand to justify the second build pipeline.
• Windows MSI not yet OS-code-signed. SignPath Foundation integration is the next Windows-side PR. Until then, expect one SmartScreen "Run anyway" click on first install only.
• "Continue with Microsoft" sign-in is hidden for this release while we reconcile the Supabase Azure provider with the production callback URL. Google sign-in is unaffected.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.5

A reliability and polish release. Chat now recovers gracefully when a CLI provider misbehaves, attachments render in the conversation, the sidebar stays usable for agents with long names, and the language across Skills surfaces is consistent with the rest of the product.

What's new

• Skills surfaces now speak "Actions". The cards you used to see in Skills are the same ones you see elsewhere in the app, with consistent copy. Browsing, adding, and inspecting community Actions feels like one product, not two.
• A "+" button in the Running column. You no longer have to leave the board to start a mission. The Running column has its own footer button that opens New Mission with the composer already focused.
• Composer focus on new missions. Open New Mission and your cursor is already in the message box. Type, send, done.
• Attachments render inline. When you or an agent share a file in chat, you see it as a proper attachment card in the conversation, not a raw filename.
• Bug reports go straight to Linear. Send a bug from inside Houston and it lands as a ticket the team triages, with the diagnostics already attached.
• Sidebar controls stay visible for long agent names. The follow-up chip and the 3-dot menu no longer get pushed off-screen when an agent has a long name.

Reliability

• Recovery from malformed Claude requests. A specific class of provider error used to leave the chat stuck. Houston now surfaces a recovery card so you can retry without restarting the agent.
• Tool runtime errors show up as recovery cards. When a tool fails mid-mission, you see a card explaining what happened and offering a retry instead of a silent stall.
• Anthropic reconnect only fires when auth is confirmed. Houston no longer flashes reconnect prompts during the brief window before sign-in finishes resolving.
• Community skill search is hardened. Edge cases that used to throw or return empty when searching the community library are handled.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.

If you are on 0.4.3 or 0.4.4

Houston should detect 0.4.5, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier

Auto-update will not pull you forward from those builds. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are back on the healthy updater path and future versions apply automatically.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress. Engine compiles for Windows, signing and CI are next.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.4

A maintenance release that validates the in-app updater path now that the relaunch fix from 0.4.3 is out in the wild. Also includes a small sidebar polish so you can tell at a glance whether the update applied.

What's new

• Sidebar follow-up chip is bigger and lives where it belongs. The "needs you" badge in the agent sidebar now sits flush right (the same slot the menu used to own), and it's a wider oval so the count is easier to read across the room. The 3-dot menu still appears in the same spot on hover, so renaming and deleting an agent works the way it did.

Why this release

The 0.4.2 build shipped with a broken in-app updater. The fix landed in 0.4.3, but anyone still on 0.4.2 cannot pick it up over the air. This 0.4.4 release exists to confirm the fixed updater is healthy on 0.4.3 installs and that future updates apply cleanly without manual reinstalls.

If you are on 0.4.3

Houston should detect 0.4.4, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own. You will see the sidebar chip change shape, that confirms the auto-update worked end-to-end.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier

Auto-update will not pull you forward. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are on the healthy updater path and 0.4.5 onward will apply automatically.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app. If in doubt: rm -rf /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress (engine compiles for Windows, signing and CI are next).
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.3

A reliability and polish release. Search across all your missions, see live agent activity right in the sidebar, queue follow-ups while an agent is mid-run, attach files with confidence, and a long list of small rough edges is gone.

What's new

• Search across every mission. A search field in Mission Control and the per-agent board scans titles first, then falls back to mission text and full conversation history. Translated empty/loading states, fast even on large workspaces.
• Mission search in the agent header. The search box now lives in the agent header next to the title (not buried in a menu), one keystroke from anywhere in the per-agent board.
• See agent activity in the sidebar. Each agent in the sidebar now shows whether it's idle, working, or waiting on you, so you can tell at a glance which agent is busy without opening it.
• Queue follow-ups mid-run. Type a follow-up while an agent is still working and Houston now batches it into one combined next turn instead of dropping it. Stop/Esc still works, and you can run parallel sessions in the same folder.
• Better attachments. Attachments now stream through binary upload sessions, large selections chunk cleanly, unsupported files are rejected with a clear message, and your composer draft is preserved if something goes wrong with the upload.
• Updater that actually relaunches. When Houston downloads a new version, the install + relaunch handoff is more reliable, no more orphaned splash window or "did it update?" guessing.
• Phone connection survives restarts. "Connect phone" pairings used to drop after a Mac sleep or quit. They now persist across restarts, so you don't have to re-scan the QR code every morning.
• OpenAI reconnect, no flapping. When Codex needed to reconnect to OpenAI, the UI sometimes flickered between connected and disconnected for a few seconds. The state machine is steady now.
• Codex recovers when its session file is gone. If the underlying Codex resume rollout file disappears or got corrupted, Houston now falls back gracefully instead of getting stuck on "resuming...".
• Codex config stays your config. Houston no longer rewrites your ~/.codex/config.toml behind your back. If you customize it, it stays customized.
• Composio integrations refresh on connect. Connecting a new Composio integration (Gmail, Slack, etc.) used to need a manual reload to show up in the agent. The list now refreshes the moment the OAuth window closes.
• Provider model picker scrolls. The model menu in agent creation no longer overflows the screen for providers with long model lists. It scrolls inside the menu.
• Cleaner Action picker. Categories that were empty or showed only one Action no longer get their own tab, so the tab bar in the Action picker doesn't waste space.
• Mission titles match your provider. The auto-summarized mission title is now generated by the same provider your agent is using, so styling and tone stay consistent.
• Bug reports go through cleanly. The Report bug button now sends through a native webhook path that doesn't get blocked by Tauri's network sandbox, so reports actually reach us.
• Tighter agent prompts. Houston's bundled agent prompts had drifted into long, repeating instructions. They've been pruned, agents stay on-character with less context overhead and quicker first responses.
• Skill search degrades gracefully. When skills.sh hits its search rate limit, Houston now backs off and shows cached results instead of erroring.

Behind the scenes

• Public changelog. gethouston.ai/changelog/ now shows release notes for every version, pulled live from GitHub. Linked from the top nav and footer.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS doesn't always replace a running app. If in doubt: rm -rf /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress (engine compiles for Windows, signing + CI are next).
• Mobile companion is still beta. Reconnects are now durable, but expect occasional hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.2

A polish release on top of 0.4.1. Cleaner chats, agents that actually use what they've learned, and a Legal agent rewritten so a non-technical founder reads the picker and instantly knows what every Action does.

What's new

• Cleaner chat. Long stretches of process detail (file reads, tool calls) now collapse into a single tidy block by default. Tap to expand when you want the full trace, ignore otherwise. The chat reads like a conversation again.
• Agents remember what they learned. Every agent now picks up its LEARNINGS.md automatically on every turn, so corrections stick across sessions instead of being forgotten the next time you open the app.
• Better chat summary. The "what changed this turn" summary now correctly attributes files generated by your agent and stops mislabeling external edits. Generated files surface in the summary instead of getting lost.
• Houston speaks human, by default. Every bundled agent now follows strict rules for talking to you: no file paths, no JSON, no command-line jargon, no narrating its own steps. Plain sentences, only what you need to act. If your agent ever slips into technical talk, that's now a bug we can fix.
• Legal agent, fully rewritten (v0.2.1). All 40 Legal Actions renamed and rewritten in founder voice. The picker now reads "Is this name free?", "Answer a customer data request", "Calculate my Delaware franchise tax", instead of cryptic slugs. Form labels match. The actual legal advice is unchanged, only the wrapping.
• Store updates clean up after themselves. When a bundled agent ships an update that renames Actions, your existing copy migrates to the new names automatically instead of accumulating duplicate old + new entries in your picker.
• Action selection sticks. When you pick an Action, it stays selected in the composer with a clear chip showing your choice, instead of getting dismissed on the next render.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS doesn't always replace a running app. If in doubt: rm -rf /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Existing Legal agents installed from the Store will auto-migrate to v0.2.1 names on first launch. No action needed on your side.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress (engine compiles for Windows, signing + CI are next).
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnects. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.1

Big release. Sign in with Google, every Mac runs the same installer, the app speaks Spanish and Portuguese, your phone can manage Houston, and the major CLIs your agents use ship preinstalled. No terminal, no extra setup.

What's new

• Sign in with Google or Microsoft. Houston now has accounts. One click, native OAuth, your session lives in macOS Keychain (never in plain files). Sign out from the sidebar or Settings.
• Houston Store with curated agents. New Store tab ships with team-built agents you can install in one click, with built-in update checks. The store modal is simpler and the GitHub-import detour is gone, so creating an agent feels like adding an app.
• Actions everywhere. Skills are now called Actions and have a real UI. The empty chat shows up to 3 featured Actions, the picker has tabs by category and a Featured row, and starting an Action takes over the composer with a clean labeled form. The conversation shows your Action as a card with all the values you filled in.
• Empty board, one tap to start. Open an agent with nothing on its board and the New Mission picker pops automatically. No more staring at an empty kanban wondering where to click.
• Codex and Composio come bundled. Both CLIs ship inside the signed Houston app, so non-technical users get them preinstalled. Claude Code installs itself on first launch (one tap, no terminal). The download is bigger but the setup is one step.
• Friendly reconnect card when a CLI logs out. When Claude or Codex drops auth in the middle of a session, you now see a labeled card with a one-click reconnect instead of cryptic terminal noise in the chat.
• Functional bug reporter. When something goes wrong the toast says "Houston, we have a problem!" and the Report bug button actually sends the report straight to our team in Slack, with your email if you're signed in.
• Español y Português. Pick your language on first launch. Everything in the app, onboarding, sidebar, Mission Control, agent tabs, settings, dialogs, errors, flips live when you switch languages. Change it any time in Settings.
• One download for every Mac. The installer is now a universal binary, the same .dmg runs on Apple Silicon and Intel. No more guessing which one to grab.
• Mobile companion (beta). Tap "Connect phone" in the sidebar, scan the QR code with the Houston iOS app, and you can manage Houston from your phone. Your Mac stays the source of truth, the phone is a window into it. Action cards render on the phone too.
• Security disclaimer on first launch. A short, plain-English note about what AI agents can do on your behalf. Read once, accept, never see it again unless the terms change.
• Cleaner card actions. Rename, Delete, and Move to done are now three matching icon buttons with instant tooltips that say exactly what each one does.
• Mission Control caught up with the per-agent board. Renaming a card works there, opening a conversation actually shows chat history, and starting a New Mission lets you pick which agent runs it without leaving the page.
• Better link previews. Sharing gethouston.ai on WhatsApp, Slack, or Twitter now shows a real social card.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS doesn't always replace a running app. If in doubt: rm -rf /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• First launch is slightly slower while Claude Code installs itself in the background. You'll see a small status indicator.
• If you had accepted the disclaimer in a pre-release build, you'll be prompted once for the final copy. Takes 10 seconds.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress (engine compiles for Windows, signing + CI are next).
• Mobile companion is beta. Expect occasional reconnects. Keep your Mac awake while using it.
• A handful of rare error messages from Claude or Codex still pass through in English even when you're running in Spanish or Portuguese.
• If you abort the Google sign-in popup on the wrong browser profile, just click the button again to retry.

Houston 0.4.0

First release on the new engine architecture.

What's new

• Product prompts now live in the app, engine is a standalone platform binary
• Data consolidates under ~/.houston/ (workspaces move out of ~/Documents/Houston/ automatically on first launch)
• Real-time reactivity restored — the board updates live when agents write files
• Race-free engine startup + sidecar signing + notarization verified in CI
• Drag-and-drop file attachments fixed
• Onboarding detects your Claude/Codex CLI from any standard install location
• Routines tab auto-detects your timezone (change it in Settings)

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston first. macOS doesn't always replace a running app.
• Your workspaces will move from ~/Documents/Houston/ to ~/.houston/workspaces/ on first launch. The old location stays as a backup.
• If you have custom scripts pointing at the old path, update them.

Known limitations

• Claude and Codex CLIs must still be installed separately. Bundled-CLI install is coming in a later release.

See the assets to download and install this version.

See the assets to download and install this version.

See the assets to download and install this version.

Houston v0.2.0 — First Release

The framework for building AI agent desktop apps. Rebranded from Keel & Deck.

What's in the box

11 React packages (@houston-ai/*): core, chat, board, layout, workspace, skills, connections, events, routines, review, memory

8 Rust crates (houston-*): sessions, db, tauri, channels, events, scheduler, memory, skills

Houston App: Unified desktop app with experience system — host multiple AI agent experiences in one app

Experience System: Three tiers — JSON-only manifests, custom React bundles, custom Rust capabilities

Quick Start

npx create-houston-experience my-agent
cd my-agent
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

Links

• npm: @houston-ai
• crates.io: search houston-