Codeman 1.28: everything that shipped since 1.18

[Ark0N]

The last announcement here was 1.18, a month ago. Since then: 30 releases in 29 days, 1.19.0 through 1.28.1, with 46 merged PRs from 12 outside contributors. That is a lot of help, thank you! The short version, by theme:

Three new CLI backends. Grok Build (xAI) landed in 1.22, DeepSeek Harness in 1.23, and OMP (Oh My Pi, built by @timkjr in #353) in 1.24. That makes nine agent CLIs in the Run menu: Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex, Gemini, Antigravity, Pi, Grok, DeepSeek and OMP. DeepSeek is a special one: its TUI reports idle, working and blocked to a supervisor, and Codeman is that supervisor. So dsh sessions get real "needs you" alerts and real wait signals instead of guesswork, and the agent skill can spawn and drive dsh workers exactly like Claude ones.

Every backend is data now, not code. @opticon454's CLI registry (#347) turned all ten run modes into entries in src/config/cli-registry/: how the binary is found, how it is launched, which env vars it gets, what it can do. ~/.codeman/clis.json can override any entry or add your own CLI. The spawn commands were verified byte-identical across 11,602 option combinations before it merged, so nothing changed for you. It just got a lot easier to add the next one.

codeman tui. A terminal dashboard for when you are in SSH or Termius instead of a browser (1.21). Sessions grouped NEEDS YOU / WORKING / IDLE / RECENT, Enter attaches, F1 comes back, and y, n or a digit answers a pending permission prompt right from the list. The old sc chooser is retired.

Codeman itself runs in Docker Compose (@opticon454, #349), spawning Docker cases as sibling containers, and it updates itself from App Settings (#373). The image went from 266 MB to 108 MB along the way. A case can also attach to a container you already run (@dignfei, #357): Codeman only execs into it and will never stop or remove it.

Behind a reverse proxy sub-path. --base-url /codeman (@mtiller, #381), so one TLS name can front several apps.

Tabs for people with 20 sessions. A collapsible left sidebar (@christianhaberl, #307), a resizable vertical tab rail (@aakhter, #334 and #335), detailed rows with a created stamp and how long the session has been in its current state, and the rail sorts by activity: whatever is blocked on you first, then longest running, then most recently quiet. Both home screens use that same order. And a third row of tabs now grows the header instead of vanishing into a 4px scroller.

The phone caught up. Tap a URL or a file path in terminal output and it opens (@rounakdatta, #321). Long-press selects text, with Copy and Line buttons. Long prompts stay visible while you type. Android and IME keyboards stop dropping characters (@aakhter #388, @dignfei #327). The iOS Safari toolbar sits where it should (@JDProfresh, #392). A localhost link an agent prints opens as a proxied web tab, so it works from your phone too (@shenlvkang-collab, #401). And Add Case can be submitted from a phone again (#368).

Alerts that tell the truth. The yellow "waiting for input" alert clears once you have looked at the session, on every device, and only when a human looks, not when the page restores itself. The red "needs you" alert clears when you answer the dialog in the terminal instead of surviving to the end of the turn. And hooks now install into every Claude workspace, including linked cases and cloned repos, which were silently hook-blind before (#304).

Codex is a first-class citizen. Codex plan usage sits in the header chip next to Claude's (@JackStuart, #346). Codex sessions no longer report idle for their entire life, and past Codex conversations show up in Past Sessions and can be resumed (@irisitymichaelgrundberg, #385 and #386). Resume on an OpenCode, Pi, Grok, DeepSeek or OMP row keeps that CLI instead of opening a Claude session.

Files. Every path an agent prints is clickable, in the terminal and in the response viewer, including paths outside the workspace (#306). Files panel search (@aakhter, #324) and a File Viewer search across the whole workspace (@aakhter, #340). The path picker takes a typed path and sorts by date (@shenlvkang-collab, #399). Downloads stream up to 2 GB and videos are seekable. Nerd Font glyphs render out of the box (@comzine, #320), and the terminal font is a per-device setting.

The response viewer works for OpenCode, Gemini, Antigravity and Pi (@aakhter, #326), shows one card per model message instead of one blob per turn (@shenlvkang-collab, #369), and its brief view shows the whole last turn (#400).

Terminal. Auto Copy on select, opt-in. Ctrl+V pastes once, not twice (@irisitymichaelgrundberg, #394). Three rendering fixes behind the spliced-characters frame you could get on session open (#395, #396, #397, same author). Claude gets truecolor, so its themed blocks render in the right color (#409). Ctrl+Z can no longer suspend a running agent (@timkjr, #404). Fable 5.1 is in the model picker (@shenlvkang-collab surfaced that in #370).

Remote sessions. A clean exit inside a remote CLI no longer gets revived as a fresh agent (@timkjr, #355), and remote OMP (#362) and remote Claude continue their conversation across a respawn.

Housekeeping you will notice. Agent-spawned scratch cases are tagged on disk and the Add Case dialog's Manage tab has a Clean up button for them. install.sh installs the build toolchain node-pty needs on Linux and keeps your Tailscale binding on a re-run. Claude Code 2.1.252 flipped the folder-trust dialog default to "No, exit" and that killed every fresh session; fixed in 1.24.2. The web-tab proxy refuses cloud-metadata targets and revokes its capabilities on logout. All production npm advisories are cleared.

Docs. There is a 30-page user manual in the wiki now.

Full notes per release are on the releases page, and every release has a Thanks section naming who did what.

To everyone who shipped this month: @opticon454, @timkjr, @shenlvkang-collab, @aakhter, @dignfei, @irisitymichaelgrundberg, @mtiller, @rounakdatta, @christianhaberl, @JackStuart, @JDProfresh, @fibr, @comzine and @tailong-wu. You built a big part of this!

What's next: 11 PRs are open right now, and in #413 I am asking what people running Codeman at work actually need. And if you have a setup worth showing, #300 is still waiting for its first post.