Piebald v0.1.13 - Branching
In this release we’ve introduced chat branching!Chat branching (Pro)
You can now conduct multiple sub-conversation/threads in the same chat with chat branching. Also known as forking, chat branching allows you to fork/branch the conversation at any user or AI message at any point in the conversation.
Quickly switch between rich text and markdown
We’ve added a little button to quickly switch between rich text and markdown. This only applies for the current chat and is reset to your default setting in Settings → General → Rich-Text Editor.
Other
We’ve also fixed several significant bugs pertaining to tool call approval and chat history disappearing, Gemini Code Assist caching, markdown parsing, streaming, theAskUserQuestion tool, and payment handling.Next up
Sub-agents, context editing, live streaming of terminal command output, integrated file browser & code editor, Git worktree management, response rewriting, web mode.Piebald v0.1.12 - portable Windows installation & direct sign-in to AI provider subscriptions
In Piebald v0.1.12 we’ve added portable distribution for Windows users and and direct sign-in to AI provider subscriptions.Direct sign-in to AI provider subscriptions
You can now sign-in to your Claude, ChatGPT, and Google AI subscriptions directly in Piebald without having to sign in Claude Code/Codex/Gemini CLI beforehand and import the credentials from them. We’re working on merging the option to import credentials from those tools into the direct sign in flow to save you a sign in if you already have valid credentials with those tools.
Portable Distribution
We now offer two methods of installation for Windows users: an installer and a portable ZIP file. The ZIP file (piebald-portable-windows-x64.zip) contains piebald.exe ready to use. Use the portable distribution if you can’t or don’t want to run the installer.Up next
Chat branching, context editing, live streaming of terminal command output, subagents, response rewriting, Git worktree support, web mode.Piebald v0.1.11 - desktop notifications & Amazon Bedrock
In this release, per user requests, we’ve added desktop notifications with sounds and support for Amazon Bedrock.Desktop notifications
Whenever the model finishes generation or calls a tool that blocks while it’s waiting for your approval, you can now get notified immediately via desktop notifications on macOS, Windows, and Linux. A sound can also be played with the notification, and clicking on the notification will bring you right into the specific chat. Additionally, if you’re on the Pro plan, you can choose from 30+ extra sounds.
Amazon Bedrock
You can now use all text-based models available via Amazon Bedrock (Claude, Nova, OSS models, etc.) in Piebald. You can source credentials from the environment (env vars, profile, shared creds, EC2 role, SSO), or manually input an access key ID and a secret access key.
Other
We’ve also- Updated Google AI and Claude Pro/Max model list
- Moved the in-app toast notifications from the bottom-right to the top-right corner
- Fixed clickable file reference flickering during streaming
Next up
Chat branching, OAuth login with subscription providers like Claude Pro/Max, context editing, live streaming of terminal command output, sub agents, response rewriting, Git worktree support, web mode.Piebald v0.1.10 - pausing the agentic loop, AGENTS.md, AI asking questions
In v0.1.10 we’ve added chat pausing, icons next to clickable file references, anAskUserQuestion tools, support for AGENTS.md, and the option to use Diffs instead of Monaco editor.Pausing the agentic loop (Pro)
You can now pause the agentic loop inside chats. Agentic AI tools work by generating a response for the given context, handling any tool calls in the response, appending the response to the conversation, generating another response, and repeating. Piebald now allows you to gracefully pause and resume that loop without interrupting a generation.Here’s a screenshot, where a read-only command that would normally be automatically approved is pending manual approval because the chat is paused. You can either manually approve it and then click the Continue button to generate one response, or click Unpause to resume the agentic loop, automatically approving the tool call as usual and generating subsequent responses.
Icons next to clickable file references (Pro)
If you have Piebald Pro, files mentioned by the AI will automatically be made clickable, and will open in the default app for the file type. Now a colored file type icon will show next to them:
Using Diffs instead of Monaco editor (Pro)
You can now use @pierre/diffs as an alternative to Monaco editor for viewing diffs when the AI creates or modifies files.| Screenshot | |
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| Diffs |  |
| Monaco |  |
AGENTS.md
Piebald now automatically readsAGENTS.md in the current directory:
AskUserQuestion built-in tool
The model can now ask you questions with a dedicated UI using the new built-in AskUserQuestion tool. Currently it only supports asking one question at a time, but we’ll remove this restriction in a later version.
Piebald v0.1.9 - customizing command execution shell, filter chats by tag, Pro trial
In v0.1.9 we’ve added several new features: customizing the shell used for running commands, filtering chats by tag, GH-flavored callout blocks, and support for Pro trials.Customizing the shell used for terminal commands
You can now control which shell is used when the model executes terminal commands. By default,sh is used on macOS and Linux and cmd.exe is used on Windows, but you can use bash and zsh on macOS and Linux and Windows PowerShell and Git Bash on Windows. You can also specify a custom command to run in order to use custom shells e.g. fish -c {command}. Go to Settings → Built-in Tools → Terminal Shell:
Pro trial
You can now try Piebald Pro for free for 14 days! Go to https://piebald.ai/pricing and click Start a free trial on the Pro plan. You’ll be redirected to sign in or create an account and then you’ll have Piebald Pro access for 2 weeks. After that you’ll need to purchase Pro or be downgraded to Basic. Starting a Pro trial doesn’t require a credit card.Filtering chats by tags (Pro)
If you have tags assigned to your chats, you can now temporarily filter chats by a specific set of tags. Click the Filter icon in the top-right corner of the chat sidebar, and select one or more tags to filter by.
Support for GitHub-flavored alert/callout blocks (Pro)
We now support GitHub-flavored alert/callout/admonition blocks (see here) when rendering markdown:
NOTE can be one of NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, or CAUTION:Clickable file path references show contents on hover (Pro)
When you hover over a file path that’s been highlighted, its contents will be loaded and displayed in a popup:
Other
We also added several smaller features—- There’s now a button to collapse all open folders in the sidebar (the screenshot of tag filtering above shows it).
- The “Help” menu now contains many useful links.
- We improved agentic performance by making both message generation and tool call execution parallel—previously it was just concurrent.
- And we fixed a lot of bugs.
Next up
Chat pausing, chat branching, context editing, response rewriting, filter chats by tags, OAuth login to subscription providers, Git worktree support.Piebald v0.1.8 - active chats view & highlighting referenced file paths
In v0.1.8 we added a feature to help you quickly see chats that need your attention, and a feature to highlight files that that AI referenced.Highlighting files referenced by the AI (Pro)
Whenever the AI outputs a path to a file or folder that exists on disk, it will be highlighted and clickable. Clicking on it will open it in the default app for the file type, or your file browser if it’s a directory:
”Active chats” view
If you have a lot of chats, it can be hard to navigate to find which ones you need. We’re working on an overhaul of chat organization with more flexibility, but in the meantime we’ve added an “Active Chats” view at the top of the chat sidebar that shows all the chats that are in progress or need your attention:
Other
We also made the app remember its last window position and size when you reopen it.We fixed several bugs, including one that made API key providers difficult to create and one that broke importing existing Claude Pro/Max credentials from Claude Code for older versions.Next
Chat pausing, chat branching, response rewriting, filter chats by tags, OAuth login to subscription providers, Git worktree support.Piebald v0.1.7 - chat relocation & duplication
In v0.1.7 we added two features for chat management: chat duplication & relocation.Relocating chats (Pro)
Click the dropdown menu on chats in the sidebar and you’ll be presented with a Relocate option. It will open up a folder browser and after you select a new location, it will configure that chat to run tool calls in that directory. It will also rewrite existing messages, tool call inputs/outputs, and context notifications to point to the new directory.You can also relocate the chat via the config sidebar if you change the path manually:
Duplicating chats (Pro)
In the same dropdown there’s now a Duplicate option. It’ll duplicate the chat with all its messages and tool calls in the exact same state, as well as any draft prompt you’re still writing, any tags you’ve assign it, and any custom config you’ve set on it.
Other
A few other things:- We added support for Claude Opus 4.5’s effort parameter, which you can configure in the config sidebar under Overrides → Anthropic Overrides.
- We made HTTP traffic retention enabled by default, and existing users who have it disabled will get a notification on app startup if the app’s data file is taking up >50 MB.
- We also enhanced the styling for thinking blocks:
| before | after |
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Next
Automatically linking file paths mentioned in the AI’s response, chat pausing, chat branching, response rewriting, OAuth login to subscription providers, Git worktree support.Piebald v0.1.6 - chat tags, continuation, web fetch
In this release we addedweb_fetch, two new Pro features, and a number of bug fixes.Automatic Chat Tagging (Pro)
You can now create custom tags (“labels” in GitHub/GitLab lingo) to assign to chats, and the automatic title generation process will also automatically suggest existing tags, and if configured, new tags for chats:
Continuation (Pro)
There’s now a continue button next to the send button in the bottom-right corner of the input box. It’s the equivalent of sending a “continue” message to the model, but instead of adding a dummy message, it just re-sends the current chat history to the provider exactly as is. It’s useful for when you accidentally interrupt the AI, or it returns a response but forgets to call tools:
web_fetch builtin tool
We added a web_fetch builtin tool—a supplement to the web_search tool we added in v0.1.5—so that the model can directly read URLs.Other
We also removed thebuiltin-agentic-tools__ prefix for builtin tools, so smaller models like Haiku 4.5 will hallucinate them much less frequently, and fewer tokens will be used.And finally, we fixed bugs around error handling, editing, pasting text, cancelling, chat status, tool call output truncation, keyboard shortcuts, and scrolling.Next up
We’re working on chat pausing/duplication/relocation, branching, response rewriting, context editing, direct OAuth login to Claude/ChatGPT/Google AI subscription, and Git worktree support.Piebald v0.1.5 - web search, HTTP traffic retention, log file
This release we’ve introduced aweb_search tool, date-/count-based HTTP traffic log retention, a log file for debugging Piebald errors, and several smaller features and improvements.Web search
We’ve implemented a tool for the model to use to search the web,web_search. We’ll also be releasing a web_fetch tool in the next version.
HTTP traffic retention (Pro)
With Piebald Pro, you can record all of the HTTP traffic performed by Piebald when interfacing with AI provider APIs to inspect their contents, investigate context issues, and learn about how the provider APIs work.The logs are very verbose, however, and can pile up quickly if you use Piebald heavily, so we added a feature where you can configure a maximum number of logs to retain and a maximum age. For example, you can set the count to 5 to only keep the last 5 logs, and the date to 1 to only keep recent logs.
”Draft prompt partially written” (Pro)
There’s a new status displayed in the sidebar for sessions that have a draft prompt written up but not sent yet. It displays as pink with the text “Draft prompt partially written:”
Log File
We now write logs to a file named after the current date, e.g.2025-12-29.log, and they’re located in Piebald’s app data directory, which differs by platform:- macOS:
~/Library/Application Support/piebald/logs - Windows:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\piebald\logs - Linux:
~/.local/share/piebald/logs
Other
We’ve added several smaller features as well:- The
read_filetool, when called with a path to a directory instead of a file, now lists the directory’s contents instead of throwing an error. We’ve observed Claude Haiku 4.5 frequently trying to do this. - Hidden files are now shown in the file @-mentioning dropdown. We also plan to make this configurable.
- Images displayed in the release notes viewer are now slightly rounded on the corners.
- The app now automatically checks for updates every 3 hours.
Next up
We’re working on web fetch, automatic chat tagging, branching, response rewriting, logging in to provider subscriptions, and worktree/Git integration, and we hope to have some of these major features out this week!Piebald v0.1.4 - file @-mentioning, rich text editor, agent skills
Today we’re releasing Piebald v0.1.4, and we’ve got 3 significant features to share: file @-mentioning, a rich text editor, and support for agent skills.File @-Mentioning
Now you can mention files (and directories) in your chat to have them automatically read for the model, which can speed up the response time by eliminating round-trips to the inference provider and back. Here’s a screenshot:
Rich-Text Editor
You can also now use a rich text editor to write messages, if you don’t prefer using markdown:
Agent Skills
We now support the new Agent Skills standard. Piebald will automatically discover global skills in~/.claude/skills and per-project skills in ./.claude/skills. We’re supporting Claude Code’s skill storage structure, being the most common, to make it easier to get started quickly; all of your existing skills should work in Piebald out of the box with no additional setup. The default skills locations for other tools like Cursor, Codex, and OpenCode will be supported soon.Here’s a screenshot of skills working in Piebald:
Other
We also added a little button on plans proposed by the AI that lets you copy the plan to your clipboard—useful to share or send to a new chat. (Pro users only.)Next Up
We’re working on web search functionality, powerful branching and response rewriting features, and support for logging in directly to provider subscriptions like Claude Max, ChatGPT, Google AI, and GitHub Copilot. We’re also going to be adding support for many more providers shortly.Piebald v0.1.3 - MCP server/tool enablement controls, chat status in the sidebar
In v0.1.3 we added controls to disable specific MCP servers/tools, and made it much easier to understand the state of chats from the sidebar:Now you’ll see whether any chats are working, have finished working, or are waiting for tool call approval:
propose_plan_to_user and run_terminal_command enabled, and those are the only ones the model gets:
Piebald v0.1.2 - Token speed meter, repaired Windows support, bug fixes
In this release we’ve fixed several bugs and introduced a small token speed meter that will show above the message input when a response is streaming. It will show an estimated tokens-per-second speed an estimated total number of tokens generated for the current message:
- File editing on Windows: On Windows, when the model tried to edit a file, it would fail if the file used Windows CRLF line endings (
\r\n). Now we detect the line endings of the file before applying the edit, normalizing the file to the most common line ending in case there are multiple in the same file - Terminal commands on Windows: Few commands, even properly formatted ones, would successfully execute on Windows because we weren’t handling escape characters correctly. Now all valid Batch and PowerShell commands will run. The default shell is currently command prompt (
cmd.exe); this will be configurable in the future. - Streaming: A small streaming bug sometimes caused individual characters to be omitted—e.g., you might see
Hi! 👋 Iminstead ofHi! 👋 I'm. - Google tool calls: Tool calls were being incorrectly translated into Google’s native format, causing an error.
- Importing credentials from Claude Code on macOS: On Windows and Linux, Claude Code stores its OAuth credentials in
~/.claude/credentials.json, but on macOS they’re stored in the Keychain—now we correctly read from the Keychain on macOS when importing existing OAuth crendentials from Claude Code (it will require your password). Thank you to Chris Watson for reporting!
Piebald v0.1.1 - Context Compaction, Plan Mode, Auto-scroll
- Context compaction: If enabled, conversations will now be automatically compacted when 85% of the context is used (configurable). You can also manually compact conversations via the ”…” icon in the chat top bar. The system prompt and hyperparameters for compaction can be modified via the “Context Compaction” system profile.
- Plan mode: You can now switch any chat at any time into plan mode via shift+tab, exactly like Claude Code. The builtin tool is called
ProposePlanToUser, which we think is a more intuitive name than CC’sExitPlanModetool. - Auto-scroll: Chats now auto-scroll down as messages are added to them.
- GPT-5.2: GPT-5.2 is now in the list of ChatGPT-subscription-compatible models.
- Trash all chats: There’s a new button to trash (soft-delete) all the chats in a folder—useful if you have a bunch of test chats or an obsolete project.
- Hard-breaks: Multiple consecutive lines with no backslash or space after them and no empty line between them (aka hard-broken lines) are now displayed as separate lines instead of automatically being displayed as a single line. Since this is somewhat uncommon (e.g. GitHub READMEs don’t do this, though GitHub issue/PR comments do), we’ll make this configurable soon, when we add markdown customization settings.
