v0.15.5 — Computer Use on Linux

Computer use, on Linux. The agent can see the screen and drive the real pointer
and keyboard — and the same release closes four instances of one recurring
defect: an operation that reports success while doing nothing. Windows and
macOS follow in 0.16.0 and 0.16.5.

This section also carries the work tagged as 0.15.0 on 2026-08-19, which never
reached GitHub or npm; folding it in here rather than shipping a version nobody
could install.

Added — computer use (Linux)

• The computer tool. Actions: screenshot, click, double_click,
  right_click, move, drag, type, key, scroll, remember. The model
  always speaks the coordinates of the image it was shown; captures are
  downscaled before sending, and conversion happens once on the way to the input
  device. Asking the model to scale its own coordinates is asking it to do
  arithmetic it cannot check, and being wrong looks like a misgrounded click.
  There is no automatic screenshot after each action — it would double the token
  cost of a run, and most sequences (type, key, key) need no visual
  confirmation; the replies tell the model to verify instead.
• A Python sidecar for capture and input (src/tools/screen/aura_screen.py),
  one long-lived process per run. Both halves hold state a one-shot call cannot:
  the ScreenCast portal session dies with its D-Bus connection, and the uinput
  device disappears when its descriptor closes. On KDE Plasma 6 Wayland this is
  the only stack that works — xdotool cannot see Wayland, ydotool 1.0.4
  creates a relative-only device, and the RemoteDesktop portal's absolute
  pointer motion is ignored. All three accept the call and silently do nothing.
• Disclosure and a two-key opt-in gate. Both --computer and
  AURA_COMPUTER_USE=1 are required, deliberately independent of the permission
  level: auto approves everything but run_shell, and its blocklist is regex
  over shell strings — it cannot inspect a click at (x, y) even in principle.
  The disclosure states plainly that a screenshot is the whole desktop, not the
  project, and that a misgrounded click lands on whatever is really there.
  Acknowledgement is stored beside the global config, so a wizard rewrite cannot
  clear a consent decision.
• A computer section in doctor. Every dependency the sidecar needs is
  present on a machine already using the feature and absent on a fresh one, so
  without a preflight the first symptom is a task dying mid-run with a Python
  traceback, after the model has spent turns planning around a tool that could
  never work. Reported as warn, never error — a machine that will never enable
  computer use is not broken for lacking evdev.
• Images in tool results, which is what lets a screenshot reach the model at
  all.

Added — publishing: HTML to PDF and PNG

• design/render.ts and the document tool. Aura could already write
  strong HTML, but everything downstream of it was missing or pretended: PDF
  generation existed only as a sentence in a prompt, and page.pdf() was called
  nowhere. HTML is the authoring format; PDF and PNG are render targets.
  Built around the two failures that produce a file which looks fine and is
  wrong — a webfont whose file arrived but was never applied (a document
  perfectly set in Times), and a page that threw yet still printed, as empty
  pages a page count cannot distinguish from a real document. Both are now
  reported unprompted.
• Print-first templates (design/templates/) as stylesheets rather than
  string substitution, so design routing stays meaningful. They cover the
  defects invisible until someone prints: dropped backgrounds, stranded
  headings, split table rows, and the trailing blank page decks leave behind.
• util/chrome.ts, ending a duplication that had already diverged with each
  copy holding half the answer — one resolved symlinks but had no direct-path
  fallback, the other had fallbacks but returned the unresolved path.

Added — search backend enablement

• Real search backends. web-search.ts rewritten to back the search tool
  with Tavily and Brave (API-backed) plus DuckDuckGo (HTML extraction with
  challenge detection) and a liveness probe; the bootstrapAuraEnv step now
  activates these backends at startup. Includes tests/web-search.test.ts.

Added — designx

• designx design commission command. A 14-direction style lexicon with
  per-target risk 1–5 and fits/cues, risk-banded routing
  (classic 1–2, balanced 1–4, wild 3–5, feral 4–5), seeded deterministic routing
  (mulberry32 + FNV-1a seedFrom), and artefact-based success. Run via
  :designx [web|deck|pdf] <brief> [--wild|--classic|--style <id>] [--seed <n>],
  with :designx styles listing the lexicon.

Added — providers

• fpt/ routes to the FPT Cloud AI marketplace. README and
  agents.env.example documented the prefix before any code implemented it, so
  -m fpt/DeepSeek-V3 fell through to the generic OpenAI-compatible branch and
  sent an FPT model id to OpenAI with an OpenAI key. FPT_BASE_URL is honoured
  for per-account endpoints, and the model id keeps its case because marketplace
  ids are mixed case and the gateway matches them exactly.

Fixed — operations that reported success while doing nothing

• read_file extracts PDF text. A résumé came back as
  Binary file: DM_Resume.pdf (254.7 KB) because .pdf sat in
  BINARY_EXTENSIONS beside .zip and .exe. At the byte level a PDF is
  binary, which is why it reads naturally in that list — but .zip is opaque
  bytes and a PDF is a container with a text layer. Nobody noticed because it
  never threw: a refusal wearing the costume of a result, so the model worked
  around it, and sharper models found pdftotext on their own. Uses -layout,
  verified against a two-column CV where raw extraction order interleaves the
  sidebar into the body. A scanned PDF with no text layer says so and points at
  OCR rather than returning a convincing empty string.
• AURA_MAX_TOKENS budget fix. openai-compatible.ts now resolves
  maxTokens from the environment before falling back to the 16k default,
  fixing finish_reason: "length" truncation when a provider's ceiling was
  larger than the hardcoded budget.
• .gitignore: .env!.example was a typo for !.env.example, so the
  negation never applied.

Documentation

• .env.example names Brave and Tavily as search backends that actually work,
  since DuckDuckGo bot-checks many IPs, and documents the two ceilings that
  truncate long single-file output with symptoms that point nowhere near their
  cause: AURA_MAX_TOKENS (reasoning models spend the output budget on internal
  thinking before emitting anything) and AURA_STREAM_IDLE_MS (the same models
  pause longer than the 60s idle timeout between thinking and emitting).
• README documents :designx and the FPT provider.

Notes

• Computer use is Linux only in this release.
• src/util/rtk.ts remains uncommitted (+53) with
  tests/rtk-wrap.test.ts (+79), still out of scope pending separate review.
  The rtkWrap rewrite touches every model-authored command the Telegram bot
  executes.